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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24949054">Constant &amp; Immovable</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/pseuds/Annabel7'>Annabel7</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Treasure Island - Lavery</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Five Years Later, Multi, based on the national theatre production, more specific warnings will go above some chapters, non-con mentions but it doesn't occur, there's eight of us in this bar you know what you're here for and I promise you'll get it</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 01:35:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>34,609</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24949054</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/pseuds/Annabel7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Hawkins put to sea after her grandmother's death and the only time she ever looked back was to check over her shoulder for ghosts.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>92</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>
    <strong>Prologue.</strong>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The story starts again on an afternoon like this: the air is warm and humid, and it pulls up the scent of clover, heather, and grass. It’s telling of a storm soon to come off the water.</p><p> </p><p>Long before the wreck of the Polaris, longer even before an inexperienced crew took off across the world on a mad dash for treasure, I used to run these hills just to run, all the way to the old sea cliffs. I didn’t know how to sail, how to navigate, or how to feel. I barely knew how to hold a conversation, but there were some things I was utterly sure of on that afternoon sitting on the cliffs.</p><p> </p><p>One: I loved the sea so deeply that I was sorely tempted to dive from the cliff right into the wine-dark water and vanish in it’s depths forever, like a selkie or sea fairy from the stories my mother and grandfather used to tell.</p><p> </p><p>Two: I knew that I couldn’t, so instead, I watched the ships through my grandfather’s spyglass, and dreamed of the day that I could sail a vessel of my own. I didn’t know what I’d <em>do. </em>I wanted to be an adventurer.</p><p> </p><p>Three: My grandmother married a retired privateer when she was young, my mother a fisherman: there was salt in my blood. It ran through me, clung to my skin, and even more of it sank into my lungs with every breath of sea air.</p><p> </p><p>When adventure came calling with death, blood, and a map of gold, I answered it with joy. When adventure killed friends and asked me if I would still crave it, I answered yes, and it killed even more.</p><p> </p><p>It wasn't a year later, on that afternoon much like this one, a storm brewing up it’s final warning, my grandmother, my guide and compass, passed away. I was without anchor in a wide and wicked world. The funeral over, mud from the churchyard still on my boots, I took to sea again. I was seventeen. I returned home for a month for business talks and signed away my gold for a merchant brig, only returning to land for the rare holiday until—</p><p> </p><p>No one asked me to continue telling the story: rather, several characters told me that I shouldn’t, and one, on his deathbed forbade me explicitly to let the rest of the tale die with me.</p><p> </p><p><em>Never</em>.</p><p> </p><p>There’s a headstone on the cliff by sea. I can see it from my bedroom window, and though I am old, I will continue to sleep in here on the top floor as long as I can, to see the moonlight glint off of the marble like a smile.</p><p> </p><p>I’ll seal this, leave out only my instructions that whatever happens I will sleep under that stone too, where I can hear the ocean roar.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“One more!”</p><p>“No,”</p><p>“Please!” a chorus of young voices repeated in my ear and if I was in even a <em>slightly</em> worse mood than I already was, I would have snapped at them. Any goodness I felt at bringing on the kids was wearing away in favor of annoyance. "Please, please! We have to know what happened to Joan!"</p><p>“No, it’s late, off with the lot of you,” I waved a dismissive hand, and tried my best to feign utter detachment from my audience. "You'll get the rest of the story next Sunday, and it involves...a saucepan." </p><p> </p><p>My cabin girls and boy wouldn’t behave under the threat of docked pay or even abandonment—perhaps, they knew I didn’t have a hard enough heart to follow through on the warnings. However, I had found that they could easily bribed with stories of the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done, the places I’ve gone, and stories I myself have been told around fires, galley tables, and while serving drinks to sailors at the inn.</p><p> </p><p>Every voyage I tried to find children in need of food, shelter. They were sort of children who couldn’t tolerate being stuck indoors at an orphanage or kept in line in a school. I was soft for their situation, I knew that if I didn’t have my grandmother, I would have ended up like them, and would have hoped beyond hope that some kind and patient captain would take me on.</p><p> </p><p>This particular batch of cabin children was led by the oldest, Jacky, a plucky girl of barely fourteen who had escaped two homes for wayward girls and I was certain that she would vanish when we docked in our first port. Still, Jacky had eyes in the back of her head and ears that could pick up a name from a mile away.</p><p> </p><p>I caught her by the collar as the children finally began to file out in a pack.</p><p> </p><p>“Not you, I’d like a word.”</p><p>“Mum, I swear I didn’t take those missing jars of peaches, I just took what was given to me at supper, swear on my life!”</p><p>I made a note to have her quartermaster check the locks on the hold, and recount.</p><p>“That’s not what I want to talk to you about. And I’m not your mother, I’m your captain.” <em>I am no one’s mother</em>.</p><p>“Yes, Mum Captain,” she replied, almost instantly. I pinched the bridge of my nose and leaned into my wingback desk chair: a gift, during my last stop in Bristol.</p><p>“You’re a sharp girl,” I started, but I hadn’t yet finalized the way I wanted to phrase my request despite having come up with the plan months earlier. I felt like I could trust her with the job, but I still wasn’t entirely sure that I could trust her not to mention it to anyone else.</p><p>“Thank you, captain.”</p><p>“I have a fourpenny for you for each day we’ll be in harbor if you keep your ears open and report to me each night on what you might catch.” It wasn’t a terrible lot of money, but a good deal. It kept my own personal story tidy, and enough to keep the girl fed if she chose to run or jump ship before we set off again.</p><p>I watched as Jacky bit the inside of her cheek in mock consideration of the offer.</p><p>“What am I hunting…Mum Captain?”</p><p>My eyes shut too long to call it a blink, and I finally spoke the words I hadn’t since I had first smelled the fresh paint of my own ship and felt for the first time in years that I was finally, truly free. To speak the words at that point was to acknowledge the memory, the fear, and whisper some shred of life back into the ghost that I knew (<em>I knew) </em>was dead. Still, I finally spoke them:</p><p>“You’re listening for any word of a one-legged, sea faring man.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Chapters will start getting longer!</p><p>EDIT: this went through an overhaul to go from third person back to the original first person narration, and the chapters *might* start coming faster now since I had so much positive feedback on the prologue on here and on Discord.</p><p>Future chapters might switch to other character viewpoints, but they'll be forwarded with a name.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. CAPTAIN'S LOG.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>
    <span class="u">CAPTAIN'S LOG.</span>
  </strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>
    <span class="u">THE POLARIS.</span>
  </b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Independent Merchant Brig out of Bristol, England. 17--</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Owner: Squire William Trelawney, Capt. J. Hawkins.</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Captain: J. Hawkins. Black Cove. 21</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>First Mate: Carlisle Anderson, Bristol. 28</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Quatermaster: Eric Scott, Liverpool. 37</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Cooper/Carpenter: Thomas Tremayne, Cumbria. 56</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Ship’s surgeon: Dr. William Porter, Black Cove. 24</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Boatswain: Angela Black, Bristol. 30</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Master At Arms/Gunner: Clara Turner, [New World, Unknown]. 28</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Helmsman: Jacob Song, London. 43</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>General sailors:</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Julia Potter, Liverpool. 17</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Marcel d’Orleans, Nice. 19</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Robert Mayhew, Black Cove. 22</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Lucy Cresswell, Liverpool. 22</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Sophia Valentino, Venice. 18</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Morgan Lewis, Liverpool. 18</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Jenny Bonny, Nassau. 15</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Beatrice O’Donnell, Bristol. 17</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>Cabin girl, Jacky, Bristol. 14</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Cabin girl, Carmen , Nice. 12</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Cabin boy, Daniel, Kingston. 12 </strong>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm going to step in and break the fourth wall here: this is for my sanity as well as yours, becuase it is Too Many Characters to remember.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There were hundreds of them, if not thousands; I <em>knew</em> that.</p><p> </p><p>I had seen <em>three</em> separate one-legged men just at the inn in my brief time back. Men returning from war, from the sea, and one was very likely a retiring pirate. Their limbs mutilated at different lengths and one was missing his right instead of his left leg, but for each of them I heard their gait and their crutch, and had to swallow my heart when it jumped up into my mouth and begged to speak for me.</p><p> </p><p>Jacky was given enough information to tell this one from the others: he would look about forty, give or take (<em>How old is that, Mum? </em>A lifetime more than me, not much at all, ancient, still young), he might have a parrot with him, green and blue and yellow and it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever—</p><p> </p><p>The chances were slim, but if I ever feared for my life since the <em>Polaris</em> was christened as mine, it was on the docks of New Amsterdam when I saw a man with a crutch and a bird on his shoulder. They were too far away to make out details, and my eyes couldn’t tell if the bird was all blue or only in parts, but they stood for far too long watching us undock. I couldn’t even tell if he had two legs.</p><p> </p><p>When we finally had a few leagues between us and the shore, I finally had to admit to myself the ghost in my bed wasn’t so harmless after all.</p><p> </p><p>After my first long voyage, I knew that I might never sleep soundly on land again. The ocean is as dangerous as any wild beast, but in its arms I was rocked like I only distantly remembered my own mother’s embrace. It was <em>alive</em> and on it I felt twice as alive as ever I did on solid ground, and the thought of ever being truly still again for too long made me itch.</p><p> </p><p>More than that however, was the fact that ever since New Amsterdam, I needed the safety of the open ocean …Or else, hard proof that <em>he</em> was gone. Evidence. A body where there was none.</p><p> </p><p>What bodies I was able to uncover that night before Dr. Livesey dragged me screaming back to the <em>Hispaniola </em>were ruined beyond recognition, and some in pieces. One crushed body in a coat had me particularly upset. I vomited in the sand, thinking it was his remains before noting the crossed belts of strange shaped knives. Dick the Dandy’s head was flattened under a sheet of rock, and I was an evil girl because I was thrilled to laugher, even as I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, that it wasn’t <em>his</em> body, so perhaps he still had his head, his face, his thieving mouth that stole—</p><p> </p><p>In a morbid mood, on a rare visit to Black Cove, I told my doctor that I had half a mind to go back to the island and find the rest of the bodies. Cursed place of dark jungle swamps and ghosts… After five years of heat and sun and rain and storm, even if the cave-in preserved them, would I be able to tell amongst all the rot-brown bones which were the bodies of those that I had known and joked with and searched with and so briefly laughed with, and which bones were from those Flint left there even longer ago than that?</p><p> </p><p>It had only been eight years since the most feared pirate in the world landed on that God-forsaken spit of land and buried all his treasure and a third of his crew.</p><p> </p><p>I tugged at one of my earrings.</p><p> </p><p>And what if, on my blackest nights, when storm and gale shake my heart in it’s cage and goad it into action, that I pray I wouldn’t have found his body?</p><p> </p><p>It didn’t mean anything other than my own loneliness and brokenness if every late night guest in a rain soaked cloak made my nerves burn at the idea <em>it could be—</em></p><p>
  
</p><p>I let a ghost into my bed and let it possess my hands, whisper it’s dreaded name under the howl of the storm and it made me feel as if I would have traded my soul for his, if hell hadn’t likely burned it to dust by then.</p><hr/><p> </p><p>After the sixth time I had docked the <em>Polaris</em>, I was bolder. I turned twenty-one in Rhode Island that June, and dined on land, trusting my ship in Anderson’s care. I even got drunk for the first time outside of one of Squire Trelawney’s parties. Certainly the first time I was drunk in a public setting, and not one single ghost grabbed me from an alley, or shoved a knife into my back. Scott walked arm in arm with me, and when he told a rougher crowd that I was just his young brother with eyes bigger than his limit, I could have kicked him but I was sober enough to understand the rouse.</p><p> </p><p>Still feeling worse for wear, when the strange men disbursed, I kissed Scott on the cheek, sisterly and affectionate. I wonder, still, if that was the reason Scott’s respect for me began to fester: because I wanted to be familial with my officers, subconsciously craving a family I hadn’t had in so long, or because I had been too friendly and trusting of my officers, dancing and drinking and singing and cursing when the ghost chorus rose in my head and the glass of rum on the table whispered <em>one more drink and you’ll get to hear the voices again</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Distantly I wondered, if Bones started drinking to get the ghosts to stop, but kept drinking because he missed them.</p><p> </p><p>From Rhode Island, we went south to Kingston delivering our own cargo of furs in favor of rum and silver ingots bound again for England.</p><p> </p><p>I told my officers that I didn’t trust the calendar: storms will be in full force in the hot September of the Spanish Main and I deeply, deeply dreaded the specifics of them. Hurricanes were not the anxiety-ridden waves bashing against the sea cliffs in Black Cove, or a dull wind that rattled siding on the inn. They were a breed all their own in their rage and energy. The very breath of the hurricane was so thick with violence that it took the shame of being the only one hiding to stay on deck with my men when we ran through a three hour arm of one, just remnants of the full storm, not even anything life threatening to good sailors.</p><p> </p><p>The air changes before a storm, and while on my midnight walk on the deck, I felt it morphing around me, power coursing through it, and cursed myself deeply for letting Scott sway Anderson, Black, and even Treymane into continuing on.</p><p> </p><p>I couldn’t see the stars to satisfy my habit of checking our route and progress by hand. Normally I would be out here, each night on the off shift when only Song at the helm might even notice me. I’d tour myself through the constellations, glorious maps that reflect the earth’s wickedness in their stories. Cepheus who would sacrifice his daughter; Cassiopeia who would insult the gods and invite their wrath on her people.</p><p> </p><p>Lyra, a harp, and a story I forgot, but I liked the idea that it is Orpheus’s: hung aloft as a trophy by that he can never touch again. Pirating gods picking it up off the island he died on, treasure still stained with blood, a prize they will never play.</p><p> </p><p>And of course, my Polaris, my north, my grandmother.</p><p> </p><p>Thank God for her, that she’s out here, her name and memory so bright; she helped control how close other ghosts can get.</p><p> </p><p>But that night the stars were veiled by the thick preluding breath of the storm that raced after us.</p><hr/><p> </p><p>We survived it, though my pride was the only one intact as my men slowly agreed that I had been right, and trying to outrun it was sheer idiocy. I did not thank for them for the acknowledgement. We were horribly blown off course, and while the <em>Polaris</em> still seemed sturdy, I wanted a second a opinion at the ship yards once we reached Bristol. Unfortunately, in some random, foul stroke of luck, what damage wasn’t dealt by the storm to the outside of the ship, appeared in a sizable leak in our water stores.</p><p> </p><p>“We’re too low on water to go straight back to Jamaica,” Scott said, his arms crossed. Even slumped against my stateroom door, he looked like a Viking: impossibly tall and strong, and dangerous enough that I was briefly attracted to him.</p><p>“I’m not about to stop at a Spanish port, and lose my ship, and certainly not any of the pirate ports along—“</p><p>“I’ve already cut rations twice this month captain, the water won’t last across the Atlantic,” Scott said more to Porter, my ship’s surgeon, than to me.</p><p>“He’s right,” Anderson shrugged. “Tortuga might be hellish at nightfall, but by day she’s just a free port—and one that’s barely four days sailing. We can go in, resupply the minimum and turn back for Kingston in less than two weeks with fair winds.”</p><p> </p><p>They did not, and never would, understand the position that I was in.</p><p> </p><p>“If I don’t stop, and the heat rises, I could lose men. If I dock in a pirate port—“</p><p>“You <em>will</em> lose men if you don’t, and that will <em>not</em> make you look any better in the eyes of Bristol. There’s a thousand other independent merchant ships. You know that,” Anderson rarely disagreed with me. It was why I made him first mate and not Scott, despite having known him longer. Anderson was ex-navy, getting out of it after claiming to have lost sight in one eye after a powder mishap. Truth of it was he wanted to desert without threat of hanging, finding the navy captains as barbaric the worst of the stories made them sound. He was a strong sailor, didn’t mind hard labor, and respected me more than captains of his own gender for the fact that I had become one at all. He came to me with soaring recommendations from former crewmen of my crewmen, and I signed him before the <em>Polaris</em> was even finished.</p><p>“Doesn’t matter if the industry disowns her entirely. She can always get her rich uncle to buy out her share and rehire the ship under—“</p><p>“<em>That</em> is <em>not</em> necessary.” Porter spoke with hard finality that was uncharacteristic of him. He cleared his throat. “We are all here because we admire and respect J—Captain Hawkins and her judge—“</p><p>“What judgment!? She hasn’t been tested! Anderson would be more fit a master for the ship.”</p><p>“We dock in Tortuga.” I said quietly. “We get water immediately and I want guns primed and loaded. Have Turner on duty for a full defense. I’ll take Scott, Mayhew, and Addams ashore. Anderson, you and Tremayne are in charge until I return. Keep up all appearances, full colors, but eyes open and ready. If we’re boarded hand over the furs and rum immediately. Give up the silver ingots only if they ask for the log.”</p><p>“Aye, Captain.” Anderson said.</p><p>“And if anyone else has any more mutinous talk of my ability to run this ship smoothly and responsibly save if for when we’re docked and have a place to find fresh hands because two thirds of this crew will follow me off.”</p><p> </p><p>Four days until I would have to run up alongside pirates in their own territory.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>It's after midnight and I'm done editing, so I'm sorry if I catch egregious errors in the morning. I'll fix them. Sorry for so much exposition. </p><p>Thank you all so much for the feedback that I've gotten so far!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This was originally a 3000 word chapter, but I opted to split it into two small and one very small chapters to keep POVs separate.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I was a small woman with a girl’s face, and I was fewer years on this cold, dark earth than most officers, <em>let alone </em>captains. It didn’t make any easier on me when I had started collecting my crew.</p><p> </p><p>My first invitation had gone to Eric Scott. I served with him on the<em> Storm Witch</em>, and he was part of the crew that I transferred with on my second, <em>Neptune’s Anchor, </em>when he was promoted to quartermaster and I to navigator. Scott was quick to temper but good with numbers, and his cynical, unfriendly way was both beneficial in keeping unruly crews in line, and refreshingly unlike the last man his age I had trusted too much. Scott took my offer immediately when he had his first look at the <em>Polaris</em>, her blue and white and grey paint gleaming in the rare Bristol sunlight. The icy water beneath her, she looked like a star bobbing in the sky. I knew he wouldn’t pass up the chance to sail her: custom built of highland timbers, with her shining new white sails, she was my prize, and I was proud of her.</p><p> </p><p>My gleaming <em>Polaris</em> was my grandmother, my daughter, my fortune, and I started to understand what the heroes in all the stories meant when they spoke of their ships as women, being rocked in the ocean’s arms in my bunk in my cabin—my staterooms, with their simple divider between an office desk and table, and my bed area. The gold, my share of it anyway, was easily gone once her bones were in place, but Squire Trelawney picked up the rest of the accounts on his own—he already owned a dozen ships, and fancied himself an admiral of sorts, but this one he insisted he and I were halves on. He was the one who insisted on having her painted too, not just sealed. She’s smaller than the sort of ship that he wanted me on too, but I preferred the speed and smaller crews of the two-mast merchants than I did the regal, hulking power of the large treasure ships we saw in the distance on our return to civilization.<br/><br/></p><p>Scott had told me that I’d have to man her carefully. She would be tempting to any man to steal, and me being a captain with so few years at sea, and on her first voyage, and a <em>her </em>at all…</p><p> </p><p>I had chosen and won over every single crewmember here, save for one: my ship’s doctor, William Porter.<br/><br/>He was more or less dropped off to me like a Christmas gift in ribbons by Dr. Livesey. He was a student who had finished his medical training as her assistant, and I had tried to ignore the fact that had been…<em>taken</em> with me since she first introduced us.</p><p> </p><p>It wasn’t (unfortunately) that I didn’t have eyes for men. I <em>did</em>, and perhaps I had less of an eye for women than I always thought I had (Lucille was still the only one I had been close with, after all). It was merely that William was…he was <em>mousey</em>. He had a bit of a stutter when he and always deferred to authority rather than voice his own opinion. He was kind and gentle and caring and likeable and there was something so deeply shattered in my core because I hated his goodness.</p><p> </p><p>Livesey wanted to know how I found him after introducing us, and I couldn’t lie to my doctor. I said he was intelligent and it was nice to have someone else on the ship as well read as I was. We both had a copy of <em>Robinson Crusoe </em>from the same bookbinder, and argued the virtues of translating Homer to the King’s English.</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t know a lick of Greek of course, or Latin, though I knew most of the stories. Ben could speak both, albeit brokenly. When he went off to university a year ago, the memories of the languages returned, and his stutter began to fade, even if he still talked to himself when left alone too long. Ben’s letters were a constant even after his presence wasn’t, and I missed them dearly, even if it broke my heart that my grandmother died thinking that Ben and I would one day marry.<br/><br/>Porter reminded me enough of Ben to stave off the worst of the homesickness. Never let anyone say that I hated Porter as a person.</p><p> </p><p>Once a month or so he would talk his way into my cabin, wanting to have supper with me and I would oblige. Someone must have filled his head with some fantasy that he and I were certain to wed in a not so distant future, because I couldn’t tolerate the way he would look at me. Dreamy, distant, yearning. The guilt gnawed at me because maybe, maybe if I were <em>good</em> then I would learn to care for him in a way that would be suitable for a wife to care about her husband. Wife. I hadn’t thought of the possibility of being one since I was sixteen, and only dreamed of it briefly. Squire Trelawney liked to rib me with some lines about the sea being my husband, about the <em>Polaris </em>my master as so many ships were their captains’ mistresses.</p><p> </p><p>But the point remained: I did not like the way that William would look at me, like I wasn’t sitting in my chair in my suite, but at a kitchen table nursing an infant.  </p><p> </p><p>As if I would be a good mother. If I even <em>could </em>be a mother. Livesey told me more than once, in a sad and pitying tone that my irregular and often absent bleeding was likely tied to the same reasons I never developed the curves of most women my age, why I was so short: I nearly died of the flu that killed my parents, my siblings, and had gone to bed hungry most nights as growing child. Either of those alone were enough to do irreparable damage to my body. Privately, and sometimes guiltily, I was <em>elated</em>.</p><p> </p><p>I never told Porter, hoping that I could use it as a reason against us marrying when he would inevitably bring it up.</p><p> </p><p>Still, until the day that Porter would finally ask me to set aside running the <em>Polaris</em> for running his household, he was a learned man who vouched for all my actions and opinions on the operations of <em>my </em>ship and I needed that, until I would finally have a cold enough heart or else enough fear to replace Scott, and anyone else who would stir discontent.</p><p> </p><p>--</p><p> </p><p>It turned out that I would have less to fear of Scott than I thought, at least on this shore excursion, because nearly half my crew ended up volunteering to join the landing party.<br/><br/>After the storm I was not the only one eager for <em>terra firma, </em>sunlight, and fresh air—well, island air. The breeze coming off the shores of Tortuga smelled little better than the ship. Jacky ran ahead as soon as the gangplank was lowered to the dock and wouldn’t be wrangled, but she wouldn’t be the first cabin girl or boy to vanish off one of the ships I served on while in port, I only wished she’d have taken off somewhere safer. I dreaded to think of what could possibly become of her, gentlemen’s code of honor among pirates or not.</p><p> </p><p>If some pirates found that sixteen was old enough to kiss, to touch, then surely the same sorts of men would think little of a girl only a couple years younger.</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t want to let mistrust sour into anything worse, and I still wanted to find Jacky, so I allowed Scott to go on for supplies with Addams (she would keep him in line at least), and their choice of hands.</p><p> </p><p>Heading farther inland was tempting to my curiosity, but so were the shacks on the beach: whole cattle roasting over fires and men and women in gaudy, well worn clothes singing and drunk even mid-day. Sand flies buzzed in my ears, and other assaults to my senses included the smell of unwashed bodies, smoking meats, and distantly: sugar burning. The thick tropical humidity wasn’t eased by the storm, and I knew it was only my nerves (so did Porter), but it made my stomach turn. A drought of his peppermint syrup was in order, even if he’d only give it to me if I’d eat a full ration. I had drunk the last of it during the storm, and the least I could do was procure more during my search for Jacky.</p><p> </p><p>William cared about me, deeply.</p><p>He was good, too good.</p><p> </p><p>There were roads on the island, but they weren’t proper things, just some half paving of stone, wood, and brick what were likely meant to be roads until the pavers realized how useless it would be to make them in the sand. The shacks improved, just barely, as I made my way towards the center of the village, and while it stank, I would have never thought it was a pirate port. It was harmless, almost joyous during the full light of day. Colorful banners strung across the area the paths, wild flowers and vines with leaves more brightly colored the squire’s rose gardens in summer crept over some of the more sturdy looking buildings. I heard multiple forge hammers at work, and shouts from storefronts. Music too, spilling out of the endless bars. Vagabonds and sailing women in various states of dress—and undress—laughed and argued outside of the mismatched shop fronts and houses. Goats, sheep, a dozen varieties of screaming fowl, wandered freely and twice I almost stepped on the same green duck, tripping, cursing, as I scuffed my expensive black leather boots.</p><p> </p><p>I had nightmares about what pirate ports might look like, and this haven wasn’t it, even as I was fully aware that any person on this street was probably a murderer, a criminal, and if this was under the cover of night, any of them were probably willing to kill me for my coat and now-ruined boots.</p><p> </p><p>Still, it occurred to me that one of the taverns might have peppermint syrup on hand, at least, since I couldn’t tell what places were private home and which were businesses, but the bars were obvious. They <em>had</em> to have an apothecary somewhere, but the bar slightly off center from what might have once been planned as a town square had squeaky saloon doors that suggested I stop there first, even under the din of lutes and a sitar, and even more off-tune singing.<br/><br/>A woman in brilliant red skirts, faded black stays, and nothing else leaned out of an upstairs window.</p><p> </p><p>“Hello, sailor! Here to mete out the crown’s justice?” It wasn’t the first time I was mistaken for a younger boy at a distance, and I merely tipped my hat before walking inside. She went back to her song, which made the knot in my stomach even tighter:</p><p>“<em>But a lass of fifteen doesn’t know what you mean, so you might as well—“</em></p><p>It was slightly cooler inside, but the air was stale, and smoggy with oil lamps on the walls. A man younger than Tremayne but not by much manned the bar, with a nod in my direction as I approached him.</p><p>“Sir?”</p><p>“Captain.” I said, my first real words to anyone who didn’t arrive here with me, and I bit back at my panic for having corrected a pirate bartender. I didn’t mind ‘Sir,’ but it was impulse to correct people who would call me the formality to mock me.</p><p>"Captains pay double,” he said.</p><p>"I don’t care.” I replied, as firmly as I could, pulling myself up as tall as I could stand without looking like a child craning her neck.</p><p>“Your vice, <em>Captain</em>?” he wasn't mocking, he was <em>defensive.</em> Interesting, for me to be seen as a possible threat when I was sure that he must face much darker characters on a daily basis, and like as not to have a loaded pistol under his bar.</p><p>“I’m resupplying, I need peppermint syrup.”</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. SILVER</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I had to pay up front. Didn’t want to.<br/><br/>There's always a chance that girls in the profession could be blood, but I didn’t have her do nothing that could lead to trouble, and she didn’t mind none that I pulled on her short hair, or passed out on one of the beds. Either she, or another one of the women took a rare pity on me, not tossing me back downstairs to the tavern until morning came and more customers. I drank what I had left on the account and passed out from the rum, and at that point I didn’t know where the parrot went.<br/><br/></p><p>Light coming in from the saloon doors made my eyes ache, and everything down to my leg felt dead but I heard another woman’s voice.</p><p>“<em>Captain</em>.”</p><p>It was familiar, but not. Older—<em>older?—than what?</em> I was still drunk, possibly, or hearing ghosts, though I didn’t think this one was dead, and mostly I only hear of ghosts what are <em>dead</em>—</p><p>“I don’t care.”</p><p>“Your vice, <em>Captain</em>?”</p><p>“I’m resupplying. I need peppermint syrup.”</p><p>           </p><p> </p><p>.....Bloody <em>fucking</em> hell.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Not His Proudest Day.</p><p> </p><p>Let's be real, he doesn't have a lot of proud ones. </p><p>From here on out, any section from another character's perspective will be in its own chapter, and titled with the character's name.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The bartender ended up being kinder than I’d have thought, unable to find peppermint immediately, and searching through cabinets, asking me where I was going, where I was from.<br/>
<br/>
Of course I answered his questions with <em>nothing</em>, and <em>no where</em>, and he laughed, a young inexperienced captain knowing well enough not to tell a bar full of pirates what we carried, but he assured me no prizes were allowed to be taken in the harbor of Tortuga. Such an easy, casual reference as to where I was, and who these people were made my throat tighten, and I tried to focus on the vast array of names and marks carved into the bar, unwilling to see the people I could feel staring at me. A couple minutes later and bartender levered himself up from below the bar with a heavy hand on it, and in the other, a sizable blue glass bottle full of a thick liquid, he pried the wax cap off of it and smelled it, holding it out for me to smell.</p><p>“Peppermint!”<br/>
<br/>
“Peppermint indeed! There you are, Captain.”</p><p>“Thank you, it’s about the only thing in the world that settles my nerves.” I paid him more than it would have cost an apothecary for the trouble. The old pirate was kinder and more accepting of my authority than any proper officer in Bristol.</p><p>“Not a problem lass, and good luck to you!” he sounded so jovial and genuine in his encouragements--and didn't bat an eye at the fact that I was a woman. This random person, more supportive than the entire trading board of the Bristol docks. </p><p>“Thank you, really!” and I was off, having done business with a pirate knowingly for the first time in my sailing career, surrounded by other pirates, and not one of them threatened my life. Didn’t mean that my fears were unwarranted, especially not as I walked out of the tavern and—<em>plumes of blue and gold</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Feathers and—</p><p>There were so many of those birds, and they could live forever, even if it was the same parrot, it didn’t mean—I tripped, caught myself on the open saloon door with a startled gasp, and fell further as it swung under my weight. The bird fluttered clumsily into the bar, circled around the room, and finally as if with a self-aware and climatic flourish, it landed on the shoulder of some snoring, filthy drunk.</p><p>“I told you last night, keep your damn bird out of here!” the bartender shouted at the man, “If you’re going to sleep, pay for another night.”</p><p>My legs carried me back into the tavern, even as my head told me to run back to my ship. I needed to know. <em> I needed to know. </em>If I didn’t know, I might never feel safe enough to sleep on land again.</p><p>“Told <em>you,</em>” came a groggy, miserable voice, rough with sleep and drink, “I already paid off my—accounts—and…<em>And…</em>”<br/>
“Get the hell out of here, go on! And take that buggered menace with you.”</p><p>While they shouted I had made it back to the counter. I put one shaking hand into my breast pocket, fished out a few coins, and dropped them on the bar.</p><p>“Get him some bread and meat—and a lime or two, looks like he hasn’t had any in an age.” It was impossible. It couldn’t have been him. He was <em>dead</em>, and though surely this person looked mostly dead, he wasn’t the rotten thing that <em>he</em> likely was by now.</p><p>“Your charity is wasted here, Captain, We get wastrels like that daily.”</p><p>“Then I won’t be so generous next time,” I said as steady as I could (not very), trying not to look directly at <em>him. </em></p><p>“Captain?” the pile of bones, beard, and ragged clothes addressed me. “Been over a week since a <em>captain</em> landed in here—wonderful! Do you—have a crew?”</p><p>“I am departing before sundown.” I heard my voice say it, but I certainly didn’t think I opened my mouth let alone spoke so smoothly. “I don’t want to see what the locals would think of a ship in His Majesty’s colors in the dark.”</p><p>“Smart as paint, girl!” <em>Oh my God.</em> “But do you need a crew, was my question?” his voice was hoarser but he was unmistakably in everything else—accent, tone, expression, the monster I had nightmares over and the man that I had grieved.</p><p> </p><p>I <em>grieved</em> for him. I coped with the loss that I alone felt out of our returning party. I ached and raged like any tropical hurricane at the injustice of his death. If he <em>had</em> to die then let it be after a trial and at the unfeeling and unknowing hand of an executioner—<em>let it have been in a fashion that I could prepare for.</em> I blamed everyone, I blamed myself, I hurt and I dreamed of being old enough to have felt him, old enough to have touched, to have <em>been </em>touched, and spent a summer kissing Lucille Trelawney in Bath to rid myself of his taste of salt, brandy, and tobacco.</p><p> </p><p>He had kissed me and I was too stunned and too young and too scared to fully commit it to memory. Lucille was as skilled as he must have been, she was beautiful, she was tall, a willowy girl, and slowly teased my lips open wider than he had and though her face was smooth, her body different, and though I liked her to whatever length I would let myself knowing she was to be married before Christmas, I couldn’t help but want to use her methods to recreate my memory of—</p><p> </p><p>I should have been glad that I didn’t fare worse than I did, but the fact that I would never know him any better, never hear him attempt to <em>explain</em> himself, even if every word of it would surely have been a devilish lie—</p><p> </p><p>I <em>mourned</em> this <em>murderer</em> for years.</p><p> </p><p>For <em>nothing.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>And the last part of that massive chapter that I opted to split into three.</p><p>There's still a few more chapters to go before the rating goes up, but HERE WE FINALLY ARE.</p><p> </p><p>Comments give me motivation to make the chapters longer/actually post at least one update a week.</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>HERE WE GO.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>To ease my fears, I used to imagine what would happen if he walked into the inn on some stormy night. Would I be able to kill him in self-defense, if it came to that? Would I be able to subdue him and wait until a magistrate arrived to cart him off to a Bristol jail cell awaiting a noose? Would I be willing to consign him to death? I hoped so.</p><p> </p><p>Or instead of immediate violence, would he seek to trick me, seduce me, convince me once again to trust him with my life—would I be foolish enough to fall for it a second time, even knowing what he really was? I hoped not.</p><p> </p><p>This was different; I wasn’t alone. It was daylight. I was armed and he was—well, he probably was armed as well. What could he even do to me in a lit and populated bar at high noon, my crew so close at hand? He clearly had no friends there, and he hadn’t yet recognized me—</p><p> </p><p>Five years didn’t change him as much as they changed me. Oh, he looked like a dead man, but closer to him it was from likely living wherever he could sleep for a night, rather than age. Even then, I might have been a bit taller, filled in as much as I likely ever would, but surely there was something to my face that would tell him who I was.</p><p> </p><p>Surely I must have been a stronger, more important memory to him, but no. He didn’t seem to remember me at all.</p><p> </p><p>My mouth moved, my voice spoke, low, steady, and calm, even as a shrill young girl in my head was screaming to run as far and fast as I could:</p><p> </p><p>“You’re looking for work?”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m looking for a ship.”</p><p> </p><p>He meant to kill me for my <em>Polaris.</em></p><p> </p><p>“I have a crew.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’ve heard word today of a fine English brig mooring in our humble little harbor. She has a fine, shining coat of paint and a clever name,” the parrot flew off, and as he struggled to stand I noticed he had a different false leg, not half so impressive as the one I remembered. I was staring. “What that? Had a right proper one, but I lost it twice over,” he grumbled.</p><p> </p><p>His hollowed out face, unkempt hair; his eyes sunken, his crutch looked like it was made from driftwood lashed together…Clothes horribly worn, and holes in places, all his gold gone, the necklace of silver crossbones too, gone.</p><p> </p><p>The last time I had seen him, he was—well, filthy yes, it was months at sea—but…<em>resplendent</em>. A fine coat and hat, his eyes outlined and shining, heavy jewelry as if he had already found that cursed treasure. The man in front of me looked like hell spat him out, and if not for the sheer fury in his eyes—he would have looked <em>harmless.</em></p><p> </p><p>“Do you need a cook? Small ship like that must have a light crew, can’t have them wasting time below decks baking and cleaning, eh?”</p><p> </p><p>I shook my head at him, a firm no, and made motion to leave. I was standing in a beam of dusty, dry sunlight that made the heat of my coat tip into unbearable fire. Silver smiled at my discomfort.</p><p> </p><p>“What, afraid to pick up a hand from such a rubbish pile of an island? I assure you, <em>sir, </em>that I am the best cook you’ll find on this side of the wicked blue Atlantic.”</p><p> </p><p>If I turned away now, I would be watching over my shoulder for the rest of my life, which could be cut <em>very</em> short depending on his current mood. <br/><br/></p><p>I stepped back into his shadowed corner of the bar and shook hands with the devil.</p><p> </p><p>“Articles?” he asked.</p><p> </p><p>“Contract.” I answered.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re not <em>navy</em> are you?” his face twisted in disgust, almost mocking.</p><p> </p><p>“Independent contract. Deliveries and pick ups for merchants.”</p><p> </p><p>“Let me collect my things and you can lead me to my post.<em> FLINT!” </em></p><p> </p><p>“PIECES OF EIGHT.” The parrot, Flint, <em>beauty</em> I called him once, flew back again, this time perched on his out stretched arm. I noticed the strap of a light bag that had been over his shoulder the entire time we spoke.</p><p> </p><p>“Ready when you are,” all the false charm and simplicity, and the earlier fury I had glimpsed gone entirely as if I had imagined it.</p><p> </p><p>My heart pounded, angry at myself, angry at him—that he didn’t seem to know me at all. That I was playing this <em>bloody </em>game with no goal or thought other than the idea that <em>perhaps</em> it would have kept me safer, knowing where he was, especially if he didn’t know it was <em>me</em>. Or, at least he wouldn’t know until my crew addressed me.</p><p> </p><p>Unless he forgot my name too.</p><p> </p><p>“Walk ahead of me. She’s on the last dock.”</p><p> </p><p>I took a deep breath.</p><p> </p><p>He would not have a chance to stab me in the back.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“Where’s the landing party!?” I shouted up to Anderson; Clara answered for him.</p><p> </p><p>“They were looking for hands to help haul, since no one seems to be willing to hire out carts to the docks. What’s this?” she nodded towards the crook I had finally allowed to walk behind me, not wanting him on my ship for even two paces without me on it too.</p><p> </p><p>“Possibly our new cook. Anderson, get Porter and Black for me. And Song.” I turned to address Clara again. “Stay here and don’t let him move or speak.” She looked at me like she did the day I told her I had a ship of my own: rife with betrayal and disbelief. “I used to know him,” I said at her ear. She knew what I meant then even if I didn’t yet: old friends and rusted loyalty were things she knew horribly well.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“Well fuck that,” Song said. Tremayne shook his head.</p><p>“I don’t know if he’d try anything but—I knew him from Black Cove I—“ I couldn’t lie. Even when I wanted to, even when I felt no guilt in doing it, I <em>couldn’t. </em></p><p> </p><p>“Jim…” Porter, sweet man, spoke my name calmly, as if to remind everyone in the room that he trusted me, that he knew me. “Who is he?”</p><p> </p><p>“I told you—I knew him—ages ago, before you came to Black Cove, but I haven’t seen him since. I’m not…I’m not about to let a man starve to death, and he could truly just need—“</p><p> </p><p>“You picked up a pirate beggar because you’re too bloody kind to let him rot?” Scott had entered without asking or announcing himself, and slammed the door of my staterooms behind him.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t know what he’s been doing since I saw him last. You’ll have to trust—“</p><p> </p><p>“Trust you? Clara’s out there with a rifle pointed at him!” Everyone looked at each other, and then back to me, with increasingly concerned expressions. <em>What have I done?</em></p><p> </p><p>“Everyone here knows that Turner has a tendency to ere on the extreme side of caution rather than slip up. And if she suspected him of piracy, she would have shot him already,” I said, speaking as much with my hands as my strained voice.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Scot</em>t.” Angela Black spoke rarely and when she did it was with a divisive and carefully planned set of words. That she only said his name, thick with warning made a flash of anger, and possibly intimidation show on his face.</p><p> </p><p>“If you don’t agree,” I started slowly, “Then Anderson and I <em>have agreed</em> that you are welcome to end your contract with the <em>Polaris</em> once we reach Kingston.”</p><p> </p><p>“And who will keep your books then? You don’t have half a head when it comes to numbers,” he said it with a wide smile over my head to my other officers, as if they didn’t already know.</p><p> </p><p>“No one would as well as you, and I will regret your leaving, but Porter can keep my books until I can find a suitable recommendation for your replacement.” Some strange peace had finally reached me, and the idea of having Scott of my ship, even though a far worse threat was now standing on my deck, made breathing easier even in the heat of my crowded room.</p><p> </p><p>“You would lose an officer over the hiring of a cook?” he sneered.</p><p> </p><p>“I am captain of this ship. I understand that I have not been for long, but save for the time I spent burying my grandmother—“<em> with my own hands, damn the cemetery caretaker, Hawkins women looked after their own</em> “—I’ve spent the last third of my life at sea and intend to continue to do so. I have been generous with your advice when it was unrequested, more generous than <em>you </em>have been with dispensing advice when I <em>have</em> requested it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Who is this man to you?” Tremayne tried, softer. He was prone to this, to thinking that because with the exception of images and clips of voices, I had no memory of a father or grandfather raising me, that I would be more eager to listen to him, to see him as a voice of reason.</p><p> </p><p>“He’s an old shipmate. I knew him from Black Cove.” Two facts, one true, one false, and one very false friend out there on my deck staring down my gunner as her eyes begged for a reason.</p><p> </p><p>“Alright, you heard the captain,” Anderson didn’t sound convinced, but he did his duty as my first officer, and agreed with me.</p><p> </p><p>“Angela? Another point: start encouraging the men to use the galley ladder as well as the one in the forecastle. No one needs to know why, and no one speaks to the cook without necessity.”</p><p> </p><p>“Anything else?” she asked, all the intonation of extreme doubt even with her perpetually unreadable face.</p><p> </p><p>“Never let him alone with me.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“Bit late to mention captain: I can’t read this.” He said, jovial, looking down at the contract I had written out. “This I can,” he pointed towards his pay. I would pay him half what I was paying the other ordinary seamen. “Not very much for such a fine vessel,”</p><p> </p><p>“We are an independent contract ship for merchants. Pay varies from voyage to voyage based on the difficulty, season, and amount of cargo.” I spoke as if bored; fear and stress of the island, of <em>him</em> had left me exhausted.</p><p> </p><p>“Where am I to bunk?”</p><p> </p><p>“By the galley in the cook’s annex, or else with the crew. Officers’ cabins flank both ends of the quarters, just in case you were thinking of trying anything.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Never. </em>I’m but an old sea cook,” what a joke, what a <em>game</em>. What was I even playing <em>for</em>?</p><p> </p><p>“You’ll go back ashore and clean up,” I said, wrinkling my noes. It was more obvious, away from the background aromas of the stinking island that he hadn’t likely bathed since I saw him last. “I require my men to be well kept. Scott—“ he scowled when I named him, “My quartermaster will take you to the nearest barber.”</p><p> </p><p>“What about supplies?”</p><p> </p><p>“Scott and Porter will show you. You will answer to either of them, Anderson, Black, Turner, or Song if I am not nearby.”</p><p> </p><p>“And my parrot?”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t want to heart it, or see any sign of it. Can you sign, or make a mark?”</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll put my mark if you’ll put my name,” he said.</p><p> </p><p>“Name?”</p><p> </p><p>He smiled the kind of wide, slow grin I never saw cross the face of a good man.</p><p> </p><p>“You wound me, <em>cabin girl</em>. Long John Silver and I trust you not forget it again.”</p><p> </p><p>I signed the contract for him and turned the paper. He looked me in the eyes as he drew a number of bold X’s, equal to the number of hoards on the map that rotted at the bottom of my sea chest.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The ink wasn’t yet dry on the contract when I dismissed him to Scott and Anderson. I was serious when I told him I wanted him cleaned up.</p><p> </p><p>Though my orders were direct in that I shouldn’t be allowed alone with him, I didn’t fancy the idea of <em>anyone</em> being alone within knife distance with him. I dread to think what happened to Arrow, and more than once I’ve woken from nightmares of finding human knucklebones in my stew. <br/><br/>Clara was the one to shut the door behind the men as they filed out—Scott, then Silver, with Anderson watching his every gesture. <br/><br/>She immediately rounded on my desk: “Are you <em>insane</em>?” <br/><br/>“If you expose him for what he’s been you’ll be exposing yourself.” She was a confident on the subject of my first voyage. In fact, Turner had been the one to tell me over a bottle of wine one night that Silver had likely evaded notice in the interim between killing Flint and my adventure because unless you were well-informed officer of the law, a navy captain, or another pirate, you would never know who he was, outstanding arrest warrant or not.<br/><br/>And Clara was in no way one of the king’s men.</p><p> </p><p>“The men I sailed with—they were petty crooks and vultures—“ she said with utter disgust. “But <em>Flint </em>and his devils…God protect us and Poseidon too.”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s blasphemy.”</p><p> </p><p>“You do not partake in Tremayne’s Sunday services.”</p><p> </p><p>“Neither do you.”</p><p> </p><p>She rubbed her eyes, her temples, running her hands down her face.</p><p> </p><p>“How do you know him?” It was bold and presumptuous of her; as if I would be more likely to let her in on it since she has taken to using me as her own personal confessor.</p><p> </p><p>“Doesn’t matter, and do <em>not</em> ask me again. No one will know—Anderson didn’t recognize his name, and he’s the only one here short of you who probably ever heard of any of Flint’s crew.” I nodded for her to sit; I would pull out the bottle of brandy from my little room behind the partition, and pour us each a measure, but Clara didn’t move an inch.</p><p> </p><p>“Just tell me one thing, Captain,” she asked quietly, “Is he dangerous?”</p><p> </p><p>“Extremely.”</p><p> </p><p>----------<br/><br/></p><p>Avoiding the galley wasn’t too difficult, as I usually only took half a ration twice a day, sometimes less, and almost always ate alone, I didn’t have to speak with him. Still…. I was afraid of him <em>looking</em> at me. I didn’t want him to know me, or acknowledge me. I wouldn’t eat anything I didn’t take from the same pot as the crew ate from, and I wouldn’t be present early or late enough that he had to serve me directly. <br/><br/>Did Eve’s mouth water, as her lips first touched with the serpent offered?</p><p> </p><p>Mine did at the first taste of his cooking: so over spiced and sweetened that a few of the northern men recoiled from it. I didn’t ask where the spices came from, or how he paid for them, certain beyond a doubt that he must have stolen them from another resupplying ship in the harbor. Was it still stealing if those whom it was taken from stole it in the first place? What an incestuous life cycle of thievery…</p><p><br/>As we drew closer to Kingston I started to consider handing him off onto another ship, or else leaving without him, but I didn’t want to invite revenge, and knowing where he was—well, that was the <em>purpose</em> to this, wasn’t it?</p><p> </p><p>I had started sleeping with a knife: I kept it wedged between the wall and my bunk, so if someone were to get past the lock to my staterooms, if someone were to creep up on me I could—</p><p> </p><p>Porter had nearly met a pistol bullet for banging on my cabin door late the second or third night that Silver was on my ship. He had wanted to talk to me about him, ask permission for an order that would give him double rations for a few weeks until he was back up to strength. I consented to it, mostly because Porter didn’t try to ask me any more questions about him. I felt a swell of more affection for the young doctor than I ever did before. To Porter, the old pirate wasn’t some mystery to solve, but just another strange choice of the captain’s, and another patient.</p><p> </p><p>Old…. I remembered him—Silver, that is, as so utterly <em>old</em> and adult. I was sixteen, barely, and the world was still comprised of children and adults, with myself crammed awkwardly in the middle. I knew of girls from the village who were my age and married, one who had already had a baby too. I knew other girls my age who were still more concerned with playing hide and seek in the woods with other children than having their own. Silver had made me want to think of myself as older, even though he was so out of reach. <br/><br/>Then again, that’s a lie too. Older than me or not, as the first half of the journey went by, and <em>that storm</em> in the middle of the sea, those following days and nights… I began to wonder. He only lived in Bristol, not a full day’s ride from Black Cove. He could <em>cook</em>, and he knew <em>numbers</em>, something that still baffle me, and he wasn’t so far above me in years or station that it would be an impossible match. What if he could visit, and what if no other woman ever told him how dearly she loved his stars or stew, and maybe he…? My strange old friend.</p><p> </p><p>All of that was dashed to hell of course. I would have preferred him dead, clearly and obviously dead. I wished I could have buried him at sixteen as I did my grandmother at eighteen and moved on properly with my life.</p><p> </p><p>As color returned to his sallow face, Silver didn’t look much older than he did five years ago. I noticed a bit of grey in his hair that I knew was recent, having had stared at him enough on the <em>Hispaniola </em>that I would have remembered some telltale sign of age.</p><p> </p><p>Meanwhile I felt as if I had changed drastically—but perhaps…not so much.</p><p> </p><p>I undressed in front of the glass mirror in my cabin.</p><p> </p><p>At least I looked less like a boy. I had small breasts, but they were noticeable enough that I had to wrap them gently, or else wear stays, under more snugly fitted suits. My hips were still narrow, but if I ran my hands down my bare waist, they would stop at the bones. My rib cage was still visible. Porter stopped trying to convince me to eat my full rations.</p><p> </p><p>I pulled on one of the muslin shifts I slept in, and crawled under the quilts on my bunk.</p><p> </p><p>Silver on my ship.</p><p> </p><p>Silver’s eyes on me in the galley like he wanted to see me flayed on a butcher’s block.</p><p> </p><p>Phantom hands slide under my shift, and I make peace with my hell-bound heart.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I know that Arrrow wasn't in this adaptation but consider: do any of the seven of us in this bar really care THAT much about keeping with canon?</p><p>I'm aware the chapters are still short, but I don't have the patience to edit the massive chapters I originally wrote them in.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Chapter 10</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Once we reached Kingston everyone breathed easier. I didn’t witness it or I’d have put him overboard in one of our two jolly boats, but Silver shrugged off concerns about how little food we had had on ship with a joke about the cabin girls drawing straws. When Jacky started to cry, Porter assured her that he didn’t mean it.</p><p> </p><p>If I had been there, <em>if I had been there</em>, I would have stuck his own knife into his chest and torn open his sternum throat to gut with my bare hands: he had knelt down and clapped the girl on the shoulder with kind reassurances, according to Porter, and told her that he’d have to teach the crew how to fish if food ran low. </p><p> </p><p>He seemed less afraid of the pirate by the day, and I still trusted him not to ask Silver any questions that he wouldn’t want to answer—or worse, questions that he <em>would</em> answer. It made him the obvious choice of an extra man to send inland with Scott and Silver for resupplying. They would keep their eyes on him, and while I wouldn’t have counted it as a dreadful loss if he were to vanish, my crew might mutiny for want of better food now that that they had all grown accustomed to his cooking. Porter had given me an ill postured navy salute as he walked backwards over the gangplank onto the docks, and my smile was genuine in it’s affection.</p><p><br/>William wasn’t <em>bad </em>looking, and he was so patient and…. Nothing at all like Lucille’s conspiratorial grins that let me know that it was only kissing in gardens, nothing like—</p><p> </p><p><em>Nothing </em>like Silver’s confident and bold mouth half open on mine for barely three seconds.</p><p> </p><p>Damn him. Poor William Porter and his sweet glances over his glasses, and kind kisses I would never taste.</p><p> </p><p>"Don't worry," Anderson said, amused next to me, as Sophia, Bee, and Marcel filed onto the docks after them. "Dr. Porter doesn't seem like the sort to be lured into staying ashore." </p><p> </p><p>"You would do well to remember your station," I grumbled, turning back for my office.</p><p> </p><hr/><p><br/>My doctor returned without Silver, but before I was able to work out if that was horrifying or not, I heard the once-familiar sound of his uneven gait on the deck.</p><p> </p><p>“When your sailors return with supplies, <em>captain</em>, I have something for you,” I could have vomited for fear to hear him address me personally and publicly for the first time since signing his contract. I didn’t respond, and didn’t care for the look he continued to give me. I turned to head back to my cabin, sure that Turner would shoot him if he was really going to attack me, but I felt a grab on my shoulder and--</p><p><br/><br/>“<em>CABIN GIRL.”</em></p><p> </p><p><em>“</em>Flint! Get off her!” the parrot fluttered on my shoulder angrily a moment before rushing back to his master. My heart slowed back to normal as it sank in that it was the bird who had screamed and caught me rather than the man. There was a time when I fed that bird bits of sugar cubes from my hands. Once I held a bit of hard tack between my teeth and Flint took it, while Silver watched. Now that I spent five years with its voice echoing in my nightmares, I couldn’t tolerate it near me.</p><p><br/>“Old pirate of a bird doesn’t know any manners—galley, once all the supplies are up. I have something for you.” Apparently he didn’t need my answer or denial, but walked away whistling, the parrot on his shoulder chirping.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A short, uneventful one, I know, but the following is from another character's perspective, and there wasn't any better way to break it.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. SILVER</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>NON-CON MENTIONED, TORTURE MENTIONED, CANNIBALISM MENTIONED none happen in this chapter, or in any subsequent chapter.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It wasn’t long ago that I sat by a fire reeking of the moldy, green wood, and planned elaborate revenge on every part of her, the bloody little traitor.</p><p> </p><p>Those stars in her skull, swordfish eyes, I would carve out last, one at a time, <em>slowly</em>, so she could watch everything I’d do to her. I would inflict on her every injury a man could to a woman and then I would gut her <em>slowly</em> enough she’d survive a few hours to suffer.</p><p> </p><p>Or, perhaps I would instead starve her until she would try to dig up her crewmates for meat, only to be stopped eight years away by clouds of rot and flies. See how she liked that reality of adventuring.</p><p> </p><p>Maroon her to live off of fish, island rodents, and palm water for months without another living human in sight.</p><p> </p><p>I imagined her weeping, begging, and broken. I wanted her between my teeth.</p><p> </p><p>Her below me, and I could almost hear her insistent, pleading voice cry out:<br/><br/><em>“Yes, yes, yes! Yes…”</em></p><p>
  
</p><p>
  
</p><p>Oh, <em>fuck</em>.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Every last fantasy, every last plan mutilated by the idea of her <em>requesting</em> it.</p><p> </p><p>I was too old for the kind of dreams that I had of her, half fish and half girl singing out on the rocks of the cay by Skeleton Island; heat-born hallucinations of her laughing just behind the trees, hiding. Dreams of her little hands on me, soft and questioning, <em>teasing.</em></p><p> </p><p>For the past five years her ghost was so close at hand, her pouting lips, her nonstop chatter, and her <em>energy</em>. Even before it all went to hell, I had wanted to know how her inability to sit still would feel in bed—a proper time, not some shag in the lower decks’ storage.</p><p> </p><p>I couldn’t do anything with a woman without hearing her, thinking of her—and none of the experienced women were what <em>she </em>would have felt like, tasted like…</p><p> </p><p>When I saw her again in the full light of her ship deck she looked like an even more incredible lay. Uptight as a schoolmarm, but I had watched her climb ratlines, I could see that there was some muscle on her bony frame, some shape that suggested breasts. I planned again to rob her blind, threaten her into handing over the ship. I attempted to revisit my old revenge plans, but her hand, trembling and cold as she shook mine, those eyes full of cold fire like she didn’t know if she wished for my head on a pike or between her legs.</p><p> </p><p>She was taller now too. Tall enough that she’d reach me on her knees.</p><p> </p><p>And she still has that pretty, pretty pout….</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Chapter 12</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>As he and I both knew it would, my curiosity had won over my fears, and I sought him out the second my off-watch began.</p><p> </p><p>“Cook?” I called carefully, as I descended into the galley.</p><p> </p><p>“Cabin girl!”</p><p> </p><p>“Captain,” I corrected as I usually did: almost bored. The name was different, the context different, but so many have tried to insult me by calling me anything other than my proper title that even if rudeness wasn’t his intention, I wouldn’t allow it. “What is it that you wanted?”</p><p> </p><p>Silver was working quickly, making <em>something</em> with a whisk, and judging by the number of shells, eggs. His hands worked quickly, picking jars out of the baskets and using their contents without checking labels—I wondered if it was mere carelessness on his part until I noticed that ever jar was a different shape or size. He knew by touch, even if he couldn’t read the labels.<br/>
<br/>
“My first concern,” he said, not looking up from his task, “Captain-Cabin Girl, is that your quartermaster doesn’t know shit about running a ship,”</p><p> </p><p>“I <em>beg </em>your pardon—“</p><p> </p><p>“Captain.” Angela stepped in, a towering and naturally intimidating woman—she should have been on deck, but there she was following <em>my </em>command to never allow me to be alone with Silver. As much as I should have been grateful for a loyal and attentive crew, I wanted this meeting to go unseen, feeling as if I had given into some sort of childhood curiosity and temptation by answering his call, and that I should be ashamed of it.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s fine,” I said quietly, calmly. She glared at Silver, who only continued to smile. Both of us waited until she was gone to continue whatever it was that was going on. He backed away from me slowly towards the oven, with a ‘<em>wait for it’</em> gesture, the smile he put on for Angela still across his face.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>False, false, false friend!</em>
</p><p> </p><p>“Look at this,” he opened the ship’s oven, and stuck a long knife into the flames, pulling something out off the top rack, using a rag to hold the edge of the hot pan.</p><p> </p><p>“What…is it?” I tried to crane my neck around him.</p><p> </p><p>“Your quartermaster’s head in a pastry.” For a moment, I believed him. “Nah, lass, it’s just an apple pie.”</p><p> </p><p>“You wasted rations to make yourself a pie?” I wasn’t sure what I expected, giving him free run of the kitchens. I should have just counted myself glad that he hadn’t yet robbed us and tried to set off back to shore in a jolly boat.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>No</em>, I used rations to make <em>you</em> an apple pie, because of my second point of concern: that doctor of yours—alas, rubbish, you have a <em>terrible</em> crew—said you don’t eat at all meals.” He went back to the bowl and whatever else he was making.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m small.” It’s a pathetic excuse, but I don’t want to eat anything that he’s made against orders, anything he made <em>for me</em>, likely full of poison if not Scott’s brains.</p><p> </p><p>“And so are those urchins that run wild and steal from your stores but they have nothing against eating more than their share.” I ignored his remarks about the cabin children. At some point I would confront him for putting his hand on Jacky’s shoulder, but right then I couldn’t open that wound again.</p><p> </p><p>“I only eat when I’m hungry and I don’t like—food.”</p><p> </p><p>He dropped the whisk and bowl, and gaped at me before picking them up again.</p><p> </p><p>“Are you<em> joking</em>? I never saw such a little sailor eat as much as—“</p><p> </p><p>“I was a <em>child</em>,”</p><p> </p><p>“Young woman.” he paused his motions for the briefest of seconds, and specified: “Very young woman.”</p><p> </p><p>“Silver, did—“</p><p> </p><p>“Never saw anyone of your size eat so much. You’ll try a slice of this,” it was <em>almost</em> an order.</p><p> </p><p>“No, no—that’s—Silver did…you—Alll of…and <em>everything</em> that happened and you saw me as….”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t know, Jim,” he said, bright as ever, and still speaking through a smile. “I liked you, but <em>you</em> fucked me over and left me for dead. Eat the pie.” I was certain that it was poisoned now, as he moved in the same light and melodic tone as an actor strolling on stage.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>I </em>didn’t leave <em>you</em>—I wanted to take you back to Bristol, <em>you</em> were going to kill <em>me</em>—you wanted me to…to <em>murder </em>for—“</p><p> </p><p>This time the whisk clattered to the floor, but he didn’t turn around to face me.</p><p> </p><p>“You didn’t send us into that bloody trap?”</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t know.”</p><p> </p><p>His head tilted, and then he turned to look at me, and nodded. He cut two sloppy slices of pie, picking up one to eat with his bare hand. Filthy pirate.</p><p> </p><p>“I believe you. You never could lie, cabin girl.”</p><p> </p><p>“I am your <em>captain</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“Eat your pie, <em>Captain</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>I was more afraid that I would enjoy it than I was that he had somehow found a poison that would kill me but not affect him, as he licked his fingers and wiped them on his apron.</p><p> </p><p>During the years between that wretched island and that moment, food fell into three categories for me: food that tasted like my grandmother’s cooking, food that tasted like Silver’s cooking, and the rest which, in it’s lacking, reminded me of both deceased cooks. All intolerable. But this <em>was</em> in reality <em>his</em> cooking again and—</p><p> </p><p>I took a bite of it. Crips pastry with sugar baked onto the top of it, and the apple flesh baked so well that it melted on my tongue.</p><p> </p><p>It was hot and sweet, different from the suppers he had been serving the crew if only for the fact he made it for <em>me</em>. The crust was made with real fresh butter, nutmeg, and…something I couldn’t quite place but it tasted like something I had drank once in a dream.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s fantastic…”</p><p> </p><p>“Take the rest of it to your room. No one has to know,” he smiled and it felt…genuine. And I knew I could never tell what was real and what wasn’t when it came to him, to anyone, I always wanted to see the good but—</p><p> </p><p>“Thank you, Silver.”</p><p> </p><p>I picked up the tin, covering it with a clean cloth to avoid curious eyes wondering why I was taking a pie back to my cabin.</p><p> </p><p>We were alone and he had held a knife in his hand and it did not end up in my heart.</p><p> </p><p>I turned my back on him, walked out of shaded galley, and back to the rational realm of my ship, my men, and the books in my cabin.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. SILVER</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The quartermaster would have been on my side, if I chose to do it.</p><p> </p><p>I still wanted to rob her, maybe fuck her once, just to get over <em>that</em> five year itch, make up my mind on whether killing her or marooning her would be better. Possibly take the ship if I could coax the crew into it. Her boatswain seemed to only see her as a cog, but the first mate, carpenter, master of arms, and the bloody doctor all seemed loyal to her personally, and all watched my every move. I half expected to see one of them standing at the foot of my hammock hung across the annex in the galley.</p><p> </p><p>But with one pie, Hawkins had gone from spymaster to spy in record time, and for half a watch she’d sit in the galley, once, then twice a week, soon almost daily. I never complained of her nonsense attempts at making excuses to be there. Not when we would soon start our return to the West Indies, ship full of pewter, tea, and silk, and she would be sitting at my table for most of it.</p><p> </p><p>She didn’t eat often, sometimes supper with the crew, but if she were in the galley she would eat whatever I put in front of her, and babbled between bites of whatever over extravagant thing I made.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Chapter 14</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>WARNING: brief mention of a deceased character assaulting children.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“What’s the blonde’s story?”</p><p> </p><p>“Why?” I asked around bites of an apple.</p><p> </p><p>“She’s the only one not afraid of me,”</p><p> </p><p>“I picked her up off of the Carolinas. She used to serve with some…small scale rum runners, but she didn’t know it. She’s spent more time in private ports around the world and she’s seen too much to be afraid of you.” I didn’t add that despite her lack of fear, she was the only one on the ship apart from myself who knew who he was.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re telling me that pretty thing was a pirate?”</p><p> </p><p>“You’d never know, wouldn’t you?” But something bothered me, deeply. “Don’t say that about her. She wasn’t—she wasn’t a pirate, only a sailor who signed to the wrong ship. Song has a similar background. You would like him, he tells tales like even <em>you</em> never could.” Song’s backstory was nothing compared to Clara. Anne Bonny might be the only woman alive to truly understand how she felt.</p><p> </p><p>If things had turned out different, I might have too.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>A flash of an unwelcome memory of a dream or nightmare, I was seventeen, eighteen, in the same circumstances as Bonny, tossing and turning in a narrow bunk in a filthy captain’s cabin on a ramshackle pirate ship, Captain Silver nudging me in the side to go back to sleep, but I feel like I’m about to vomit when I wake up.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>“If Turner isn’t a pirate then I wonder what you aren’t. Not a pirate, or even an ex-pirate?” the amusement in his voice makes him sound like my old friend, even as he talked about the</p><p> </p><p>“<em>No</em>. I’m an honest sailor. Never was anything else.” I set down my fork, and bit my lip, reached for my earring, anything to avoid his eyes, staring as if they were digging through my skull where images from the past replayed over and over. My appetite was gone. It was too easy to forget around him that my old best friend was the same man who had hurt me so gravely—he broke my resolve, my morals, my heart, I watched him kill. He had nearly killed my friends and would have had me kill and kill again with him until we would be up to our shoulders in blood and gold.</p><p> </p><p>“Ex-pirate, honest sailor with terrible luck…How many of us are on this ship?” he asked.</p><p> </p><p>“You, Turner, and me. The cabin girls won’t tell me where they’re from.”</p><p> </p><p>“Cabin girls?”</p><p> </p><p>“I have three of them. You’ve met Jacky.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>You</em> have children?”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m not their mother—I’m not anyone’s mother—but those children don’t have anyone else. I make sure they’re fed and pay them enough to eat if they run off while we’re docked.” I poked at the baked apples. No butter left to make pies, but he had baked two apples in rum, molasses, and something spicy-sweet that I did not sign off for in the supplies. I was curious again if he had stolen some crate of expensive herbs bound for a lord’s kitchen.</p><p> </p><p>Silver leaned into my line of vision.</p><p> </p><p>“If you don’t like those I’ll give the rest to your urchins—“</p><p> </p><p>“Silver, if you speak to any of my girls I will kill you myself.” I had never spoken truer words. The threat jumped out of my mouth, honest and violent and sure.</p><p> </p><p>“Hard not to when the brats keep trying to steal food from my stores and galley.”</p><p> </p><p>“I mean it—if you look at Jacky again, if you even think about touching her I’ll—“</p><p> </p><p>“Jim, she’s only a <em>girl—“</em> there was no mistaking the insult in his voice.</p><p>
  
</p><p><em>“</em>So was I.”</p><p> </p><p>It hangs in the air for a moment before he shrugs.</p><p> </p><p>“Not that young. I’m a bad man, Jim, I won’t lie about that and never told you otherwise, but—I’m not <em>Flint</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>How very like him to expose a more terrible evil and an exposed nerve of his own in order to make one of his wrongs fade into an appealingly soft grey.</p><p> </p><p>“Flint would—“ <em>Ben….</em></p><p> </p><p>“Not a vice in the world was below him. There’s a reason Blackbeard called him scum off the devil’s river to his face.”</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t know…” <em>Ben, </em>Ben, Ben what has this evil, foul world let happen to you?</p><p> </p><p>“And <em>you</em>,” he pointed at me with a ladle, turning away from the stove. “Were <em>not</em> a child. Old enough to sign a marriage license. Old enough to know what it felt like to want. Are you going to eat those apples, or not?”</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“If not, let me put the rest back in the oven with a little more sugar. Or do you think it wasn’t enough vanilla?”</p><p> </p><p>“Where did you get vanilla?”</p><p> </p><p>“What I do on shore is no business of yours, <em>Captain</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“It <em>is</em> if you’re stealing and giving me and my ship a bad name.”</p><p> </p><p>“You signed on a pirate, possibly three. That’s <em>your</em> problem if the reputation of the <em>Polaris</em> isn’t what you wanted.”</p><p> </p><p>“We are bound for a return to Bristol. Exchange of shipments, resupply, fresh hands if anyone opts out of returning”</p><p> </p><p>“Bristol…”</p><p> </p><p>“If you try anything, I’ll let them hang you.” I said, and tried to summon that same surety I threatened him with for talking to my children.</p><p> </p><p>“No you won’t,” he said, casually.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes I—“</p><p> </p><p>“Try this instead.” He sat a bowl of soup in front of me.</p><p> </p><p>“What are you doing?” I was <em>tired</em> of this. Why did he have to—<em>be himself. </em>He was so much like my old friend so briefly that I almost—</p><p> </p><p>“You have to eat. Try it.”</p><p> </p><p>“What is it?”</p><p> </p><p>“Fish soup; better than making the men eat limes by the slice.”</p><p> </p><p>“Did you poison it?”</p><p> </p><p>“No? When are you going to stop asking me that?”</p><p> </p><p><em>When I trust you again?</em> How was I supposed to answer that? I would never be able to trust him again; he burned that bridge between us. <em>Us.</em> How awful. As if we were ever a…<em>unit</em>.</p><p> </p><p>I lifted the bowl to my lips; he hadn’t given me a spoon.</p><p> </p><p>“It tastes so strange!” I said before thinking of how unflattering that must sound, “It isn’t <em>bad</em> I mean. I’ve—I’ve never had <em>sour</em> soup.” I licked it from my lips. Bite of lime, citrus and sweet, some vague saltiness from the fish.</p><p> </p><p>“Picked up that dish north of Singapore…twelve years ago?” he looked distant for a moment.</p><p> </p><p>“You can’t read recipes.”</p><p> </p><p>“Everyone has his strengths. I’d warrant a guess that I’m better with numbers than anyone else on this ship, navigating too. Can’t read a cookbook but you tell me: does it taste like I need to?”</p><p> </p><p>“Not…not for this. It’s very good.” I wasn’t lying that time. It was <em>very strange</em>, but it’s complexity kept begging for another taste, and soon I had eaten the whole bowl of it. “I like it,” I said, trying to be casual about the fact that I was twirling my fingertip in the dregs to lick up the few bits of some green leafy herb that was left on the bottom.</p><p> </p><p>“So that takes take of supper for tonight. As for Sunday: do you still prefer not to see slaughter? The pig, I mean. There are two below decks for roasting. Do you want me to do it below deck, or above?”</p><p> </p><p>“Top deck, and clean up when you’re done.” My voice had gone back to the detached tone I gave orders in: a strange sound that came naturally to me the first day I saw the skeleton of my <em>Polaris</em> under construction at the shipyard.</p><p> </p><p>“Will you watch?” he asked, interested, curious.</p><p> </p><p>“I only ever killed hens. I don’t have the—“ he didn’t warrant the excuses. I didn’t need to search my soul to explain why a screaming pig, or worse, a pig that didn’t know what was coming was different to me than snapping the neck of a chicken. He didn’t deserve those glimpses into me. “I don’t need to give you a reason. Have Turner shoot it quickly.” I nearly added a ‘please’ to the end of it.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Merciful</em>, are you now, lass?”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s not a weakness.”</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t say it was. You’re <em>good</em>.” He makes it sound like an insult.</p><p> </p><p>“I try to choose it when I can.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re convictions were always strong,” he watches me, looks at the empty soup bowl and raises his eyes back to my face, “Once you settled on them.”</p><p> </p><p>“What does that mean? What does that even mean?!” it was infuriating, and I realized too late I fell behind a step in whatever hellish game this was.</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve always been quick to change alliances when you think you’ve been betrayed—a bit of an Othello there—but you’ll go whole heartedly into it then,”</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t know me that well,” <em>Where did he learn who Othello is?</em></p><p> </p><p>“Nonsense, girl. Best friends, weren’t we?” there was enough bitterness to him that I opened my mouth with a defense ready even as I stood up in order to storm out.</p><p> </p><p>“Silver, I didn’t—“</p><p> </p><p>He grinned at my tone, and I got up to leave.</p><p> </p><p>“Better not pick at that scab then. Go; lick your old wounds without me. I’ll give the rest of the apples to your urchins—and you take another cup of that soup.” It was an order, not a suggestion, and that alone made me want to refuse. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”</p><p> </p><p>How, when I was the one who made motion to storm off, did he manage to make <em>me</em> feel as if <em>he</em> kicked me out?</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Sorry the editing is even more hasty than usual, but I work the next 8 days straight and wanted to get 12 through 14 posted before then.</p><p>As always comments give me energy and motivation and also, they're just fun to read. Thank you all on this tiny little fandom island for continuing with me!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Chapter 15</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here Be The Reason The Rating Went Up.<br/>Mentions of non-con, but none occurs. </p><p>Technically you can skip this chapter if you need to/want to.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Captain?” Clara poked into the open door of my staterooms. She was paranoid, or else incredibly guilty, and came to see me at least once a day—unlike the rest of my officers, who barely spoke to me.</p><p> </p><p>It irked me, that she acted like I couldn’t be trusted to protect myself, though I suppose I was the one who strived to make it clear that <em>no one</em> on the ship could protect themselves against Silver alone. Not long after Silver’s arrival, she gave me a lady pistol that her sister-in-law had given her as a wedding gift in another life. Its handle was inlaid with pearl, and it showed signs of having been well carried if not well used. I kept it tucked in my trousers, along with my hidden assortment of knives around the cabin, and the one in my bed.</p><p> </p><p>“Is something wrong?” I was unhappy with her for a plethora of reasons, and admit, that in a gross abuse of my authority, I was looking for a reason to discipline her.</p><p> </p><p>“No,” she said, thoughtful, spinning an astrolabe on my desk, one of my few true treasures. “Look, I know you don’t want anyone asking, but if Silver—“</p><p> </p><p>“You have to stop talking to him. I said no one should be alone with him, and you have repeatedly disobeyed me.”</p><p> </p><p>“Is he really more dangerous than the men of the [unwritten]?” I’ve sworn to Clara to take the secrets of her life before the <em>Polaris</em> to the grave, the names of her ship, her captain, her crew, her home ports, her prizes, her role in what they had taken and where—they were safe with me, and I will not write them down, not even here.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes,” I said, full strength and conviction that even those she had survived would have been mere dogs before the ship of wolves that comprised Flint’s crew. My own research in the years after my adventure, my own questioning of sailors who had heard first-hand accounts of what happened led me to a conclusion: that the gaggle of half-mad men who sailed on the <em>Hispaniola</em> did not well represent the <em>Walrus’</em>s usual host of murderous raiders.</p><p> </p><p>One story, told to me by a fearful dock accountant in Charles Town, said that Flint would send his quartermaster over to the other ships, leading a slaughter of those who would not surrender and those who did without discrimination. Any prisoners who were not murdered where they stood, the quartermaster would string up by the arms and hips before gutting them alive, and lowering the poor souls halfway to the water, to sharks attracted by their own gore. Bets would be placed on which man the sharks would jump for first.</p><p> </p><p>I’ve been eating pies made by the hands that did that.</p><p> </p><p>I’ve been lulling myself to sleep thinking of the hands that did that.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m always armed. [Unwritten] taught me that,” she said, as if to argue the order I didn’t yet say:</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t speak with Silver. Don’t spend any more time alone with him, and do not listen to his stories. He would make himself out to be a traveler, a vagabond, and an explorer until you forget what he’s done and what you’ve suffered. If you ever hope to cross paths with [Unwritten] again, do not let Silver reel you in.” A knot formed in my chest at the thought of him trying to seduce her—the officer I was closest to, arguably, and the only other one I ever worried about my own safety at the point of signing on. Of course, I knew Clara by this point, I knew that she would never harm me, but at the time I hired her, I was worried. I had heard of her previous ship—all the seas had, and a few stories of a golden haired angel with a knife between her teeth at the captain’s side suddenly sounded less like flights of fancy and more like truth.</p><p> </p><p>Clara might come across as meek and even wilting when asked about her past, or when trying to speak to superiors, but despite what I had told Silver, she was an ex-pirate, same as he. She had taken the last name of another local sea story, and let her maiden name and her captain’s name vanish.</p><p> </p><p>“I—don’t think it’s like that,” she smiled: a sweet, shy glimpse of heart that almost won mine. “I think he wants an ear that won’t judge him on his past.”</p><p> </p><p>“Clara, shut the door. I have a story for you.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p>                                                                                                                         Captain Smollet’s guts blown out onto the sand.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>                                                                              “You and me, we put a pistol bullet in each one of their brains.”</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>                                   <strong>     “<em>WRONG SIDE OF THE EQUATION AGAIN.”</em></strong></p>
<hr/><p>
  
</p><p>“But who is he to you?” she asked, chin in her hand as she leaned on my desk. The girlish informality made me feel younger than I was, and I drew my knees up, resting my heels on my chair, my arms around my legs.</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“Five or six days a week, the two of you vanish into the galley and talk too low to hear from the deck. Some of the crew thinks you’re scheming something together.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Scheming</em>?”</p><p> </p><p>“The younger sailors think you’re planning on striking the colors.”</p><p> </p><p>“Well, I’m <em>not</em>. I hate pirates as much as you do—possibly more.”</p><p> </p><p>“You can’t hate them more than I do.” That was true. Clara was born into a family of the career, and had found herself in it as an adult. Me, I only had—</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t let Silver get into your head,” I settled on.</p><p> </p><p>“Strange,” Clara said, standing up, and pushing slightly away from my desk. “I was going to stay the same thing to you.” She sighed; nostrils flared, and didn’t look to me as she reached for the door. “Anderson and Porter are worried about you too, you know.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>He set the mug of tea in front of me, and reached into a basket for something that resembled a biscuit. Silver made tack or bread every few days by sifting mealy flour through sieve. When I had asked him why my ship was hotter than hell, he said it was cope with the warmth of the oven every morning, or eat mealworms.</p><p> </p><p>For a pirate, he was strangely civilized when it came to the kitchen.</p><p> </p><p>“Anderson’s not talking to you?”</p><p> </p><p>“Thank you,” I blew on the steaming mug. “Grandma said once that holding a hot cup improves you, even if you don’t drink from it.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s the heat, cabin girl. Tricks you into thinking that you’re holding onto someone.”</p><p> </p><p>“I think it’s just the warmth on its own,” I said; I hoped to avoid letting anything else slip to him about my loosening hold on my crew. My first mate and quartermaster not speaking to me, and only showing up for orders on deck, never coming to my rooms for them as they used to do. Even Clara had gone two days without speaking to me now.</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t thrive well in cold formality.</p><p> </p><p>“You haven’t touched another person in a long time,” he observed, nodding towards me with his own mug that smelled more of liquor than tea.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>What</em>?”</p><p> </p><p>“You. You’re very lonely.”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s <em>none</em> of <em>your</em>—“</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, come now, I don’t mean nothing by it; it’s just not <em>natural</em>, the upright English way. Last time you had contact with another was probably shaking my hand over the contract,” my face must have betrayed the answer. “I’m right, aren’t I?”</p><p> </p><p>“What does it matter?” He was right, I’ve sailed with men from all over the world, and it was mostly the English who were so against being…close. Marcel noted it too: even French sailors were closer, physically, than the English sailors. Pirates were closer too, regardless of where they started. I remembered that much about the <em>Walrus </em>crew. “It doesn’t matter,” I answered my own question, “And it’s none of your business.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve got a number of fit, young men here at your every beck and call—or that Turner lass.” I didn’t like his look—like he was digging through my head with a pick to try and pull out a thread of my brain that he could use against me.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m their <em>captain</em>—I—“ <em>I didn’t need this</em>. “Porter said to ease up on the sugar by the way. You’ll rot my crew’s teeth, and you’re going through the supplies too quickly.”</p><p> </p><p>“Porter too. The Turner lass might be more appealing, but I don’t doubt you’ll eventually marry the twitchy doctor,”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Silver</em>. I—I’m not <em>dealing</em> with this. I’m done, I’m not coming down here any—“</p><p> </p><p>“Fine, give me some privacy to see if Turner has pirate’s tattoos to match her pirate’s mouth,” he slammed his cleaver down into the cutting board and the sound made my entire body shake.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re—“</p><p> </p><p>“A bad man? No, no that’s not all it is, is it? Have you been coming down here looking for an apology?”</p><p> </p><p>“No, but you owe me a thousand.” I hated myself, hated my voice, hated how strangled and miserable I sounded. I drew myself up to full height.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>I </em>owe <em>you?!</em>” he sounded almost deranged and I reached towards my trousers for the lady pistol on instinct. “Jim, girl, it’s almost as if you think <em>I’m </em>the one who left you for dead on a desert island, took <em>your</em> share of gold, and had <em>my </em>rich old idiot use <em>more</em> of <em>your</em> gold to by <em>me </em>a ship, where I ‘allow’ you to work out of pity because you’re half dead, and let everyone know you’re a charity case, don’t speak to her, and let’s set spies on her as well!”</p><p> </p><p>“You didn’t <em>earn</em> that gold.” It was the only point he made I could argue against.</p><p> </p><p>“Neither did you. You stole the gold from the only people who could claim they worked for it.”</p><p> </p><p>Flint screamed on his perch.</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t want your pity, girl.” <em>Liar.</em></p><p> </p><p>“And I didn’t miss your cooking.” <em>Liar. Liar. Liar. LIAR, </em>an irate voice shrieked in my skull and wouldn’t stop. “Don’t make me a villain,” I said, my teeth clenched but my eyes shut. “You’re—“</p><p> </p><p>“A lair, thief, murdering pirate—and you still walk down here. For what, I wonder, if not for apologies you haven’t earned?”</p><p> </p><p>“To keep an eye on you.” I said. I opened my eyes to see what he was doing, keeping my hand at my hip, hopefully (doubtfully) looking casual rather than reaching for a weapon.</p><p> </p><p>“Get someone else to do it then, I can’t keep—“ he laughed, a crackling, bitter thing. “Can’t keep doing this over and over when all I want to do is tear you into pieces that Flint could eat,” his voice was raw and thick.</p><p> </p><p>I had seen sad things—any well-traveled person has—but I’d never heard anything quite so ugly as his subdued and growling lies.</p><p> </p><p>“No…you don’t.” I said, finding the truth of it so much more horrifying than the lust for violence it masqueraded as. “I used to think you were my friend but you—you never saw me on that level at all—“</p><p> </p><p>“Course not, I was sailing nearly a decade when you were probably born But you would have had a share equal to mine—“</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t care about the damn treasure! Okay? Yes, I was starving, we were poor, but all I wanted was an adventure, and—and—“ <em>I was so lonely</em>.</p><p> </p><p>“A cottage for your grandmother?” he said it teasingly, cruelly, despite the fact that <em>he</em> was the one who always remembered, always offered—</p><p> </p><p>“Do <em>not</em> talk about my grandmother.” I couldn’t control myself. Hearing him speak of the woman who comprised my entire family, who I once girlishly and naïvely wanted to introduce him to in the worst way felt violating.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ve thought about the moment you betrayed me over and over, and either you always meant to do it, right from the very start, or else you chose to do it later.” I was done shaking, and even as he leered over me, I refused to cower. I could smell his breath, salt pork and rum. “And then, I wondered when it was you made that choice—correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s because I mentioned your grandmother, wasn’t it?”</p><p> </p><p>“You wanted me to commit murder with you.”</p><p> </p><p>“You already killed one of my men.” <em>The blood of Israel Hand staining my clothes. Wearing Silver’s abandoned spare shirts, and the doctor’s spare trousers for the journey home. </em></p><p> </p><p>“In self defense. It wasn’t…<em>planned </em>like you asked of me.”</p><p> </p><p>“I also kissed you, didn’t I?”</p><p> </p><p>“I thought you were my <em>friend</em>.” I nearly spat the words at him, all the betrayal still so raw years later;<em> I trusted him and he kissed me</em>.</p><p> </p><p>“And I thought you liked me.”</p><p> </p><p>“I did!” I squeaked, unsure at his tone. I squared my shoulders.</p><p> </p><p>“You were old enough to want, weren’t you?” that phrase again. I hated him for it.</p><p> </p><p>“I wanted a friend. I was a miserable, lonely, sheltered <em>child</em>—“</p><p> </p><p>“Not—no. No, not a child. Your big selkie eyes following me, and you never leaving me the hell alone—maybe you didn’t know <em>what</em> it was you wanted, but you still felt <em>want</em> for the first time your short, sad life.”</p><p> </p><p>I stared at him, my lips parting so slightly as the picture became clearer and clearer:</p><p> </p><p>“Is this closure for you, John?” He snarled like a caged dog and grabbed ahold of the beam behind me. I didn’t move an inch. “You say every horrible thing you can think of until I hate you as much as I should, as much as I wish I hated you? As much as I <em>tried</em> to hate you?”</p><p> </p><p>“Hate me? You’ve made me into a sad glutton for misery—you act like you want food and a friend, but you are as eager and high strung as ever and I wonder,” he breathed heavily as he spoke, leaning towards me ever so slightly, “If I were to take you right here where you stand would you <em>finally</em> bloody stop talking for two minutes?”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t believe you’re capable of it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Get out of my galley before I hurt you, cabin girl.”</p><p> </p><p>“No, no, no, see. This is <em>my </em>ship,” I said, soft, slow, my head tilted slightly as I saw past his pathetic façade of brutality, what was going on. “My ship, <em>my </em>galley, and I don’t think you’ll do it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Jim—“ his breath was hot on my skin. “I’ll do it.”</p><p> </p><p>“You won’t hurt me. You can’t hurt me with words. I don’t think you can with anything else either.” He was leaning forward, and had me trapped me against the wall with the way his arm gripped the beam. His other hand on the wall by my head: it looked menacing, but I could tell it was for balance. I stood slightly on my toes so I could look him in the eye.</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, I think I will, I —“</p><p> </p><p>“Then do it,”</p><p> </p><p>His mouth tasted no better than his breath, but this was not the kiss on the cursed island. This was all I’d been and done running up against his underestimation of me, and as he once did to my unready and unprepared sixteen-year-old self, I gripped his jaw, tilted it too, but unlike what he had done that last time he kissed me, I slid my tongue into his gasping mouth. It was a dare, a stupid game, and consent—I didn’t delude myself to think he was good enough of a man to wait for one, but I couldn’t quite figure what else he was after.</p><p> </p><p>I felt him cave in and crumble—my free hand was on his forearm, his other hand removed form the wall and between us, shoving aside fabric. I barely took a glance down but dragged him limping back into the shadowed corner.</p><p> </p><p>No ghost ever kissed me like this. Lucille never kissed me like this, Ben never did. This was not artful, or clean, or kind, but wanting, and I wanted, and I <em>wanted</em>—I let go of his face to find the double rows of buttons on the front my trousers, and he pushed me hard against the counter until I was perched up on it.</p><p> </p><p>I tried to get a look but he was too fast, all of it was. Painful too, but his mouth turned desperate, begging something of me that I didn’t know—I braced my legs around his waist—less of experience and more of a desire to not fall as he repeatedly shoved himself into me just a mere handful of times before I felt him—<em>spasm</em>, and then something warm, and wet, and not mine was inside.</p><p>I drew back when I noticed he wasn’t kissing me anymore, and the soreness of my lips from teeth and pressure registered in my head before I was fully aware of my torn maidenhead.</p><p> </p><p>Silver’s eyes didn’t meet mine, but he righted himself quickly and limped back.</p><p> </p><p>“That was it?” I asked; I winced as I sat up straighter on the counter.</p><p> </p><p>“Well not <em>ideally, </em>luv!” he huffed, reaching for something in a cabinet on the other side of the galley.</p><p> </p><p>Shouldn’t it have felt—I didn’t know, but more dramatic? I just lost my—</p><p> </p><p>“What are you doing?”</p><p> </p><p>“Vinegar and a clean rag. My sisters used to swear by it,” he put them in my hands without looking at me, and quickly turned away again. I gathered enough of what he meant for me to do, and set to cleaning myself off, cleaning myself <em>out</em>, and cringing when the vinegar stung. I looked curiously at the rag: sticky fluids intermingled with blood. Less than my weak and unpredictable monthlies, but this was blood from something <em>injured</em> and it made what unfolded real.</p><p> </p><p>“S-Stand by the door. I don’t want anyone coming in.”</p><p> </p><p>He did as was told, and seemed as if he was still trying to remember how to breathe without sounding like he was drowning.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Shout out to courtneybgood, with whom I plotted a lot of their first hook up, and the circumstances around it, and who allowed me to use it here.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Chapter 16</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here there be some Adult Content™ Happy October. Glad we're all still stuck on this island.</p><p>This chapter is dedicated to courtneybgood with whom I plotted the latter half of it months ago. See note for more details and many more thank-yous.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Three days after <em>it </em>happened, I still hadn’t wandered back to the galley. Turner assumed I had fought with Silver—she told me as much when she sheepishly mentioned he had stopped her for conversation <em>twice</em>. Apparently, he had for the first time in all <em>their</em> conversations—that familiar knot in my gut formed at the thought of them—mentioned me, asking idly if I had updated the officers any on our next port. The coward was likely planning on running. Not that I would blame him, try to stop him, or miss him when he was gone.</p><p> </p><p>Anderson actually came into my office on his off shift—we discussed leads and possible next ports if there were no contracts to be had in Bristol. We went over a list of who wanted off, who we might be able to bring on, and the latest of the debate on <em>what</em> exactly to do about Scott. Between shifts, Angela reported on the other sailors…and gave me word from Scott that the cook had worked his way through nearly all the sugar rations, and we were missing two entire crates of rum that we were supposed to deliver. I refused to turn the woman into a mere messenger as my quartermaster had done, and gave her no word to deliver. If Scott wanted to give me advice on how to discipline a member of my crew he would have to do it to my face.</p><p> </p><p>“Did he say anything else, Black?”</p><p> </p><p>“Only that he keeps the men in line, but the pirate is your problem,” she spoke as if she didn’t entirely disagree with him.</p><p> </p><p>“He has no idea,” I grumbled, crossing my legs under the desk.</p><p> </p><p>“I have to ask—I know you think Scott has it out for him, but what did he tell you? The cook. Did he say he was starving in Port Royal? I know you’ve got yourself a heart and a soft spot for a sad story—“</p><p> </p><p>“It’s complicated. I told you. I know him. I <em>knew</em> him. And—I do have a heart. Perhaps too soft of one, but better than too cold.” I also was aware that I could not avoid Silver forever, even if I wanted to…<em>if I wanted to</em>….</p><p> </p><p>I don’t think I wanted to.</p><p> </p><p>With the best face of annoyance I could muster, I said:</p><p> </p><p>“Tell Silver I want him in here after he’s through with his duties. Don’t tell him about the missing rum, but tell him to bring a bottle from the ship’s supplies. I’m curious if he even knows the difference.” So much for not treating her like a messenger.</p><p> </p><p>“What happened to never leaving you alone with him?” She looked at me like she was sizing me up during our first meeting, trying to see if I was someone she wanted to work for or not even though she had been on my ship for a year. This conversation was longer than any I had with her before, and possibly after.</p><p> </p><p>“Clara is going to cover for me. Send her in next.”</p><p> </p><p>I lied so smoothly that I could feel Grandma’s terrible frown.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Grandma would have preferred I ran the inn myself, take less risks in life, and marry well. She would have preferred that I held my children captive to a fair and honest life until they would take the inn over for me, marry well, and hold their children captive to the same safe fate. I cannot blame her; her beloved husband built the Benbow by hand out of the scraps of his own ship, and one day I’ll still, if I am lucky, die there when I am no longer fit enough to sail.</p><p> </p><p>But the ocean always sang to me as she must have sang to the three previous generations of Hawkins women. They married sailors, thinking that that was the call they were hearing, and they loved them well, but I knew it was no man, no woman, no human that the stars held for me: I was bound for the sea itself since I was a girl. I knew it some how, even as a child, and every fire I tended and dish I cleaned and drink I poured only served to fuel the desire in me to feel the ocean’s wind at my back.</p><p> </p><p>My adventure didn’t turn me away from sailing.</p><p> </p><p>If I could just keep dwelling on it, on how Grandma would hate me, on how much Livesey and the squire would be betrayed, I would never allow Silver into my head or body again.</p><p> </p><p>The soreness between my legs would be a good reason to avoid him too, if not for the fact that it had subsided in favor of some strange ache that my own hands could do nothing for.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Night fell with uneventful detachment; the sun bored with our petty dramas decided to drop below the cool water, and sleep for some hours while us mere mortal sorted out our nonsense and moved on with our lives. The stars rose, haughty and desperate for attention, pulling up light cloud cover as if to say <em>fine, if you won’t look at us, you </em>can’t <em>look at us.</em></p><p> </p><p>I hadn’t left my cabin for more than ten minutes at all today: Silver had off on the midday watch, and he usually found himself hovering about wherever I was working. My legs were stiff from having done little more than pace the deck early in the morning, and then return to this my cavern of blue and white and blonde-stained woods. My ship. Bright as her name, she made me feel welcome and at home, even if I was not at ease.</p><p> </p><p>When Clara finally stumbled into my cabin, she had forgotten Angela’s message (if the woman had given it at all) and instead came in to debrief me on a scuffle between O’Donnel and Lewis, and that Calpurnia refused to take her watch in the crow’s nest based on the lunar phase. The usual daily issues were refreshing after these past strange months. Solutions were simple: Jenny was to climb to the crow’s nest and receive double rations for her trouble, and let that be the end of it. As for fight, according to Clara, Scott had already broken it up and sent both of them to pick oakum during their off watch.</p><p> </p><p>I wouldn’t have been as harsh, but then again, that’s why I made him quartermaster.</p><p> </p><p>“Thank you, Turner,” and now for the lies to make Grandma proud: “Oh, and now that we’re in such calm waters, tell Song to take the night off. You can take the helm.”</p><p> </p><p>“Captain, I—“</p><p> </p><p>“I know you used to like having the deck to yourself on your old ship,” I said sympathetically, sweetly, and as terrible at falsity as ever. I rolled my eyes at myself and hit my head on the back of my chair. “And more than that, I know you are used to keeping secrets. If one is added to your list…”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s a horrible idea,” her fingers twitched slightly—she didn’t fidget, not like I did, but she had this slight <em>twitch</em> when her past was referred to.</p><p> </p><p>“But you’ll cover for me? Surely someone once did the same for you and—“</p><p> </p><p>“<em>And</em> I have regretted it ever since—<em>Jim</em>, this is—“</p><p> </p><p>“An order from your present captain.” I said it firmly. “Helm. Until first bell. Angela was told you’re covering for me during my meeting with him.”</p><p> </p><p>Clara took off her hat, ran her hands through her long gold hair and rubbed her eyes.</p><p> </p><p>“By God and Davy Jones, I hope you understand what you’re getting into,” she righted her hat, and turned to leave.</p><p> </p><p>“So do I, Turner… You’re dismissed!” I added quickly as she was clearly making her way out whether I gave her permission or not.</p><p> </p><p>I sank into my chair and debated the pretense of keeping on my captain’s coat, even before the door shut hard behind her.</p><p> </p><p>Why bother? <em>Why bother</em> keeping on the damn coat?</p><p> </p><p>He had <em>touched me</em>, he had <em>ruined me</em>.</p><p> </p><p>But I didn’t feel ruined, or different beyond the pain and…</p><p> </p><p>I shuddered, rose from my desk, and closed up my inks, pens, log books and most of precious maps. I crossed the office to the partition behind which was my bunk and sea chest. I undressed, folded my clothes, and pulled on one of the thin linen shifts I made a habit of sleeping in—I smiled, they were the closest thing to dresses I owned, save for the black skirt and blouse I buried Grandma in. I lit the wall lamp after dousing all other lights, and returned to wait at my desk with a book and a map I had left out.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>I waited</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>And I waited.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>And I <em>waited</em>. I  always <em>hated</em> waiting.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Naturally, it was right as I had made up my mind to douse my lights and go to bed, maybe have a brandy and attend let a phantom of a memory touch me until the stress faded, when my door finally creaked open. Startled more by the sound than the reality, I jumped up from my chair.</p><p> </p><p>I knew it was him. Everyone else, even Clara would have announced themselves.</p><p> </p><p>“Silver, before you come any farther, tell me: did that happen—in…in the galley, or did it not?” It only then occurred to me that it might be something he wished to forget and put behind him, or else—</p><p> </p><p>“Did it happen?” he looked confused. “Of course it happened, lasted at least forty minutes and half the surfaces of my kitchen. Very satisfying and exhausting all the way around.”</p><p> </p><p>I had to bite my lip to keep from grinning, but I couldn’t stop the heat of a blush on my face. I took a deep breath.</p><p> </p><p>“Come inside and lock the door behind you.”</p><p> </p><p>Silver crept into the room, slow as a ghost. He shut the door with his real foot, scuffing it no doubt, and reaching behind blindly for the bolt of the interior lock. He had with him a bottle of the good rum, the rum we were <em>shipping</em>.</p><p> </p><p>“What’s that?”</p><p> </p><p>He gracelessly set the bottle on my desk.</p><p> </p><p>“I wasn’t going to drop in empty handed,” the charm covered something that I would have thought was anxiety if he had been any other man.</p><p> </p><p>“You were told to bring a bottle of rum from the supplies.”</p><p> </p><p>“I wouldn’t have a lady drinking that <em>swill</em>. Something <em>finer</em> for you.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m a lady now?”</p><p> </p><p>“Captain, lady…Both?” he said with a smile.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Silver</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>He opened the bottle with a flourish, took a drink from it—a long one, and passed it to me.</p><p> </p><p>“Is this to clear the air between us? After—what <em>happened</em>?”</p><p> </p><p>“Some liquid courage for what I am sure is about to be a miserable conversation mostly comprised of your morals versus your hungers as a woman.” The bastard shrugged.</p><p> </p><p>“My <em>what</em>?”</p><p> </p><p>“You heard me. A woman of your age with all these sailors at her command but heaven forbid the captain take advantage of their obedience—you said as much yourself. And,” he said, pacing, the floor a bit, pointing at me as he happened upon a new point, “You never took advantage of your quartermaster’s anger—he’d have you over the gunwales in a second, you know, and seems your <em>type</em>—and <em>then</em> I figured it out.” He tapped his skull like it was some stroke of genius. “You needed to get the first one out of the way, and get a taste for it, and who better than the miserable old pirate that no one would believe anyway? You know, it must have been this wretched humidity, I usually last <em>much</em> longer than—“</p><p> </p><p>“Usually?” of <em>all</em> the awful accusations he threw at me that I wanted to argue I <em>still </em>do not know why my traitorous tongue asked <em>that</em> of him.</p><p> </p><p>“When I can afford the coin to buy or the time to charm it from a woman for free,” he looked thoughtful, towards the windows at either side of my cabin, and then back to me: “Why do I have the distinct feeling that fucking you will be the most expensive thing I’ve ever done?”</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t—“ to his credit, he did wait for me to continue, but I couldn’t form a coherent sentence. He handed me the bottle.</p><p> </p><p>“What? Don’t want me mentioning other women?” That too. I had no illusions that he was anything other than experienced, but to hear him <em>say it</em> felt—intimidating.</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t…call it <em>that</em>.” Apparently, the words were fuel. He smiled as I took a drink from the bottle, distantly aware that his mouth had just touched the same surface as mine—some indirect, indecent kiss. But, just as my decision to put on the shift in places of my proper clothing, what did it matter now?</p><p> </p><p>“Embarrassed that you let the cook fuck you, or do you already regret losing your long held virginity?”</p><p> </p><p>“Both! Wait—<em>neither—</em>And—I didn’t <em>let you</em>, you—“</p><p> </p><p>“No, you didn’t <em>let </em>me, you bloody dared me,” he grabbed the bottle back, took a swig, and set it hard on the desk. “<em>Minx.</em>”</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t mean…I don’t know what I wanted.”</p><p> </p><p>“Now <em>that</em>—That, I finally believe is true. Wet as the great blue sea around us but tight as a topsail in full breeze,” I made up mind; I was going to kill him. “In my defense, I didn’t have much to work with.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>How</em> are you so—so <em>damned</em> <em>calm</em>?”</p><p> </p><p>“Because, <em>Captain</em> Hawkins, right here and now with you wearing <em>that</em>,” his eyes dragged slowly down and I was painfully aware of just how thin the shift was, “And my old heart still working too hard from <em>finally</em> getting—“</p><p> </p><p>“Finally? What—did you just see me in that bar and decide that…”</p><p> </p><p>Silver’s smile made something in my chest tighten, not unlike the knot formed when I would think of him with Clara, and very similar to the fearful thrum I’d sense when Scott would get angry enough to make think he planned a mutiny.</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t act like you didn’t know. <em>Cabin girl</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“I knew.” I didn’t want to; I wanted to believe that the connection we had then was—<em>purer</em> than that. I wanted to think I was <em>special</em>, wanted to think we had some fundamental similarity that drew us into each other—something more than him wanting to have me. But he was deaf to my thoughts, pacing around my desk, and next thing I knew, he stood over me, leaning over my book and map, taking up a pencil and <em>writing </em>on my expensive master copy of our routes. “<em>Silver</em> do you mind—“ but he was pressed up to my side, reaching for my compass, as if he was welcome to touch me, as if I had given him permission.</p><p> </p><p>As if it was five years ago and he was leaning around me to reach the box of spices on the shelf.</p><p> </p><p>“Sailing is faster where you’re heading, but without reason to run, the water is deeper and safer farther north, and along this leg of the coast,” he drew in a heavy line to mark it separate from the careful one I had drawn. “You won’t need to spend as much effort getting around the reefs and rocks, and in the end get there a day or two sooner—which means less risk of running into a squall this late in the year.”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s—“</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve got a sailor on your ship who’s made this run a thousand times, and you look like you haven’t made it through your first storm on your own yet.” I opened my mouth to start shouting at him, but he kept going. “Easy mistake for a young captain. No one needs to know that I changed the route.”</p><p> </p><p>“You aren’t leading us to our deaths, are you?”</p><p> </p><p>“Now, I know you have a hard time understanding this, so I’ll put it simply as I know how: I like you, girl. Always been honest about that point, but if you can’t believe it then believe that I wouldn’t sail myself into a waiting hell.”</p><p> </p><p>He made a point; I had to admit that much. His own life seemed to be the only thing he valued other than gold, ignoring his claims to like me—</p><p> </p><p>I figured he must like me. But he also likes rum, brandy, and fresh pork. The only thing I think he held in genuine affection was his awful parrot.</p><p> </p><p>“Why are you doing this?” I tried to turn around but he hadn’t moved yet, and I came up against his hard chest.</p><p> </p><p>“Because you might—“ he stopped, and though I couldn’t see his face, I felt his breath, slow and deep, as he exhaled.</p><p> </p><p>“Might what?”</p><p> </p><p>“Find yourself in a situation where you need help, and I don’t want to clue in to your men that you only have the vaguest idea under the stars what you’re doing.”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s not true! I’ve sailed—“</p><p> </p><p>“Not long <em>enough</em>. Not as long as I have, or in conditions as unfavorable as I have. Hell, I was sailing for a decade when you born.”</p><p> </p><p>“You <em>cannot</em> be older than thirty-five.” Even with my back to him, I <em>knew </em>he raised an eyebrow at me. “Thirty-seven,” I conceded.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s not as if you <em>mind</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t,” the ship rocked slightly, and pressed me farther back into him. The traitorous sea itself, pushing me into his arms <em>again.</em> I swallowed hard. <em>He’s Flint’s right hand, a murderer; he’s practically old enough to be your father, and he’s</em>—warm. Even through his clothing, through my thin nightgown, <em>warm</em> and my cabin was so <em>cold</em>.</p><p> </p><p>“You never did mind.”</p><p> </p><p>“I <em>did </em>mind. I was a girl. And you—<em>you</em> wouldn’t have—“</p><p> </p><p>“How didn’t you read what we had as attraction?” he asked, utterly confused.</p><p> </p><p>“You were a <em>grown-up.</em> I didn’t—I didn’t…” a memory of leaning towards him on deck under the stars when I thought for <em>sure</em> he was thinking about kissing me bubbled up in my head uninvited. If he did in that moment, I would have let him go as far as I knew what kissing was: a brief press of lips, maybe wet? I didn’t know what kissing could be back then.</p><p> </p><p>“You didn’t ever wonder what I would do if you only asked it of me?” he leaned down to rest his chin on my shoulder and I wanted so badly to shrug him off, push him away, but I was tilting my head aside as his beard tickled my neck: “Because I would have done whatever you wanted.”</p><p> </p><p><em>Whatever I wanted.<br/>
</em><br/>
I did want to kiss him, true, but in the same way that I wanted to be captain of a ship—the <em>feeling</em> of the ideal rather than the actual <em>practice</em>. At the time when Silver would occasionally give me a look that burned, I only had a vague sense of what went on between men and women, highlighted and refreshed by Livesey when she had walked in on him letting me try a bit of some sweet roasted fruit (so strange! The things he made, the places he must have learned them) from his own fork. She had shown me images in her anatomical reference book, told me horror stories about diseases and childbirth, along with how likely it would be that I would be abandoned by him as soon as we reached port, regardless of how little or how much I gave him.</p><p> </p><p>My vague wants then had <em>images,</em> and I couldn’t look Silver in the eye. Livesey’s talk had only kept me away from him for forty hours or so, but then I wanted him not as girls yearn for kissing boys, as a dream, I wanted him as a man. Even if I wasn’t sure I would truly be interested in such things yet, I wanted the <em>ideal</em> of it. Still…it didn’t sound <em>too</em> painful—and if there was a way to make it easier, I was sure my best friend would do it for me.</p><p> </p><p>I couldn’t picture life at the inn without him. Of course the treasure would fund us to get the place back to it’s former glory, and of course he would work with me in the kitchen, and eventually marry me like the blacksmith’s son married the girl apprenticed to her. Then when I would still be biting my lip and crossing my arms and nervous, he would be gentle and kind as ever. Easy going and funny and clever and still my best friend.</p><p> </p><p>They were the dreams of a short-sighed and innocent girl. A girl who dreamed of stolen kisses in kitchens, of shy smiles and a good man for a husband. Those short weeks before the mutiny, before <em>his</em> mutiny, were like none I’d ever known.</p><p> </p><p>Silver was the closest friend I ever had—if not in age then in all else. Status—he was his own man, neither above nor below a poor innkeeper’s granddaughter (daughter? People told me she loved me as her own child, and I saw her as much a mother as I did a grandmother). He was <em>strange</em> in a way that complimented my own strangeness. His love of the stars, his excitable manner that made him so charming. People called me a changeling and a faerie child, and children mocked me, but there was Silver with the same distant way of thinking, coming to conclusions and unique answers as fast as I could. I never met someone who <em>thought</em> like I did: fast and off the traveled roads, and our conversations would span a dozen subjects in as many minutes.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strike>I fit under his arm like I belonged there.</strike>
</p><p> </p><p>His arm fit around me like he belonged there.</p><p> </p><p>“Whatever I wanted?”</p><p> </p><p>“Whatever you wanted, I’d have taught you,” his voice was warm as his body, and rumbled in his chest against my back as he spoke.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you think—do you still want me that way?” I asked, and true, he already <em>had</em> me that way but what if… “Even though I’m—older?”</p><p> </p><p>Silver dropped the pencil and compass, closed his arms around me and with his lips against my ear said: “I want you <em>more</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>The ship rocked again, and I stood up, not sure how I felt about being trapped in his arms. Fat lot of good it did me, he was still taller than I was by over a head while he was wearing his boots and I was not. A clap of thunder, or maybe a distant wave made my heart race, and his hands braced my shoulders; tight enough I would have to use force if I wanted to run.</p><p> </p><p>….but not tight enough to make me want to run. Instead, I turned sharply to face him, my hands on his shirt, fingers curling into the fabric of it.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you hear it, building to a rage?” it wasn’t to scare me, he looked too happy, too excited. He always did love a good storm.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s the wrong time of year. It won’t be a bad one, it’s too late,” but I was breathing heavily, and no matter how stoic I tried to keep my face as his eyes bored into mine, I felt <em>wobbly</em> like I hadn’t felt since I stepped on the <em>Hispaniola</em> the first time. It’s the storm, that’s all, that’s all, I keep repeating it to myself, willing myself to focus on the waves, on my ship, on my ocean.</p><p> </p><p>“Doesn’t matter. The sea knows you’re mine,” his hands reached my hips and I backed away from him. I couldn’t do it. I <em>couldn’t</em>. I already did. <em>I couldn’t do it again.</em> Silver—my old friend, <em>Long John Silver, quartermaster and murderer to Captain James Flint. </em>He tried to <em>have me killed before. </em>I’m not <em>safe</em> around him, no one is.</p><p> </p><p>And I had never wanted anything so badly in my entire pathetic life.</p><p> </p><p>I stepped closer again, my toes curling into the thin old carpet on my cabin floor. My hands found their way around his wrists. <em>My hands have bloodstains too</em>. I didn’t look him in the eye, but at least now I’d feel if he would make a motion to reach for a weapon as I rest my head against his chest. Perhaps he didn’t have a heart, but something beat there, and it made him seem more dreadfully mortal than even the events of the galley did.</p><p> </p><p>It might have been a minute, or it could have been four, but I made up my mind. Damned evil or not, mundane or myth, the stars might move but their fires burn the same paths year after year after year and my stars crossed his now for the second time. We were interlocked somehow, and I was fated to this, and right there perhaps I could convince myself that he was just a sailor, and so was I.</p><p> </p><p>His hand was on my neck and my breath hitched at the briefest of thoughts that he might try and strangle me, but he only tilted my chin up enough to kiss me again, hard and wet, and I didn’t <em>enjoy</em> it.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Will it always going to feel like I’m a child getting away with this?</em>
</p><p> </p><p>He tried to lift me up onto the desk but I broke away from him, wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, because the feeling of my lips having been touched overwhelmed my senses. His eyes were fire, like any devil’s, but his mouth (<em>wet too)</em> was set in a strange way, either confusion or amusement.</p><p> </p><p>I couldn’t hold his gaze, for fear that it might burn my eyes but I kept facing him as I backed up towards my bunk.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Isn’t this how it’s done?</em>
</p><p> </p><p>With a tug on one of my earrings and my arms folded over my chest, I took one shaky breath, and leaned over. I took the hem of my shift in hand and felt it in my fingers—mid-quality fabric, soft enough on bare skin and meant to be worn as a first layer in dresses, for proper ladies, not for me, and I never cared, never wanted to be a proper lady, and <em>proper ladies</em> didn’t invite strange men to bed—</p><p> </p><p>But he wasn’t strange. Not to me, and I was strange too. <em>He was once my best friend</em>.</p><p> </p><p>I lifted the shift up and off over my shoulders and dropped it in front of the latched wardrobe, feeling immediately cold.</p><p> </p><p>His lips parted, and maybe he said something, but I just heard the creaking of the ship, the waves outside—eager, increasing, but far from the violence of the hurricane. A terrible storm in my heart was spinning everything inside me; my limbs ached with the memory of contorting myself lower and lower into the apple barrel. Livesey’s voice “<em>Never be alone with him, never let him close the galley doors, and never let him touch you.</em>”</p><p> </p><p>“You look—“</p><p> </p><p>“Like a boy.”</p><p> </p><p>His smile ticks up as if he’s going to laugh, but he doesn’t.</p><p> </p><p>“Not a boy, or I wouldn’t—“</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t want to stare at him, but I couldn’t help it. The lump on the front of his trousers was signal enough, and even though it wasn’t pain, I still felt <em>something</em> ache between my legs when I looked at it.</p><p> </p><p>“Please?” is that what he was waiting for, permission? Or did he want me to beg? I backed up towards my bunk, climbed onto it, and sat up against the wall at the head of it. I wasn’t going to ask again. Distantly, I wondered what he thought about men, considering his denial that I looked like a boy: so many sailors, myself included didn’t have a preference of gender for their partners, or if they did it wasn’t a very strong one. That, or they preferred the company of their own sex, and found sea better at keeping secrets than earth. I wondered what Silver would think, if he had known that it was the squire’s niece who taught me how to kiss.</p><p> </p><p>My thoughts were cut off as he climbed onto the bunk, and partially over me. He was puzzled again, thoughtful. Next thing I knew I was on his lap, and was kissing him hard. He broke it, my teeth dragged on his lower lip, and it summoned a growl that almost sounded angry. His own teeth were present in the kisses along my neck, if you could call such ministrations a word as soft as ‘kiss.’</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t even hold this tightly to him in the galley; hadn’t held onto him quite like this since he caught me in that storm.</p><p> </p><p>It was odd, how much this part seemed—ordinary. After all, I spend a summer doing this with Lucille, and Ben and I had spent several boring afternoons doing this. <em>He was so afraid of Grandma finding out, after all, he was likely a few years older than I was</em>. If Grandma saw me now…</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>…my grandfather was older than her. By over a decade, and a sailor too. Hawkins women share one single trait.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In the near dark and near silence, I could almost relax. This was recognizable ground where I had some decent skill, secondhand lessons from Lucille that she had picked up from girls at her boarding school in Paris. Silver’s hands hadn’t left my back, my shoulders, my waist just yet, and though I could <em>feel</em> him harder still, he didn’t do anything else.</p><p> </p><p>Lucille’s voice in my head, teasing: <em>innocent lamb</em>. Words and phrases she would say that I shied from, never asking for definitions. It wasn’t that I wanted to appear prudish, but disciplined. I thought if I could be sexless and untouchable, maybe I could be taken seriously. As badly as I needed some kind of warmth and connection, I stopped her hands at the buttons of my breeches both times she tried. She has assumed, partially correct, that I must have had a terrible experience in my youth (what youth? It was only a couple years after <em>him</em>), and that it led to my distaste for shared pleasure. <em>Poor bird,</em> she liked to call me when I woke with nightmares. I was never so sacrificial or fragile as she accused me.</p><p> </p><p>When the need for air overpowered the thought that everything would be alright as long as I never stopped kissing him, I inched back to the wall and hugged my knees to my chest. Any sense of modesty was gone; I was merely cold. This man had been <em>inside</em> of me, I was ruined and broken and still hadn’t dismissed the possibility that he might kill me by morning, regardless of how increasingly unlikely it was</p><p> </p><p>“Isn’t—isn’t this how it’s done?” I asked after his prolonged silence.</p><p> </p><p>“It could be,” he said, shuffling farther up the bunk, one hand on my knee with the same look he gave me in the galley that first week—like he was thinking of carving me to pieces. His other hand opened his belt and—<em>what a terrible, ugly thing</em>—he pulled himself out, only pushing down trousers and drawers enough to access, just as he did in the galley.</p><p> </p><p>“Aren’t—aren’t you going to undress? Like me?” it was how it was done, wasn’t it? I didn’t have any women in my life to talk to me about this—Grandma had merely explained to me that my first courses were not, in fact, a sign that I was dying, and she had told me the most simple, basic details of things then. On the ship, Livesey when told me more, she said nothing of enjoying it, nothing of pleasure, or desire, and as awful as Silver looked, I was still here, I was still in bed, <em>I was still</em> <em>asking for him to do it again</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Silver’s hand fell off my knee, and his frown looked insulted.</p><p> </p><p>“I only—I-I thought that’s how…it goes.”</p><p> </p><p>He laughed, bitter and tired, but so amused that <em>I </em>felt insulted.</p><p> </p><p>“Give an old hopper a minute,” he said, almost annoyed that I had bothered him with the task. I didn’t mean for it to be difficult, but it didn’t occur to me either that he likely had something keeping the false leg on, and perhaps it was time consuming, or merely something he didn’t want me to see.</p><p> </p><p>The promise of what I was offering must have urged him on though, because he rose from his spot, and took off his vest, his shirt, dropping them on the trunk at the foot of my bed instead of the floor; he bent over and shoved down his trousers—leather straps and buckles crisscrossed up what remained of his left thigh—I never realized how much of his own leg was missing, and then continued up around his hips, over his drawers. With a sense of bored indifference, he made quick work of them.</p><p> </p><p>I admit that I stared more at the old injury than I did the bare skin of his torso—I had, after all, seen that much before. Standing in the galley, scrubbing out soup bowls and a kettle from the night before and miserably hot, Silver went from having his shirt untied to taking it off entirely. I didn’t know what to do. It was utterly indecent, and I had never seen a man in any state of undress quite like that before, and at sixteen I didn’t know <em>why</em> I felt some strange urge to give him a teasing shove on the arm, or to poke him or to do <em>something</em> that would give me an excuse to touch him and be sure that he was real.</p><p> </p><p>All the old tattoos were just as I remembered them, the scars too. There’s a newer looking bullet scar on his left side, and a blue and black sea hawk in flight on his right bicep that I hadn’t noticed before. More were visible on his remaining leg, and I wanted to know what they were, and where he got them, and why he chose them. I wanted to know how he got the scars, who shot him and why, and where it happened, and I wanted to know the truth about his leg, and I had never seen a body that told so many <em>stories</em>. I wanted to <em>touch all of him at once</em> because I couldn’t <em>read</em> those marks like one of my books—I had to <em>feel</em> them.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re easily impressed, captain. Should’ve gotten a look at me ten years ago,” he tried to play it as a joke, but it was clear he didn’t appreciate my staring. Too bad; I didn’t give a damn. He had done nothing but stare at me and pick me apart with strange gazes and jarring looks, and I hadn’t seen him this close in <em>so long</em> and he would have to learn to cope with the treatment that he had so rudely given to me.</p><p> </p><p>I kept staring as he caught the false leg by a couple of the straps, and let it down easily, scowling at the realization he had nothing to hold on to now, but had to sit on the edge of the bed, unattractively shifting about to take his drawers off. He’s only a man. Pirate, murderer, criminal, all of it or not. I gave into the childish bad habit of sucking on my lip it when I didn’t know what to do or say, almost without noticing it, but Silver had reached to my knee again, and I bit down until I tasted blood.</p><p> </p><p>“Eyes like a swordfish, you’ve got,” he said, soft. I’d have given anything bar my <em>Polaris</em> to read his mind, figure what he was thinking as he touched my bony knee. I slid down, my knees still up, but at least I was lying down. <em>This makes sense. If it’s supposed to be in bed</em>…</p><p> </p><p>He kissed my knee, lips burning, and I was sure he was about to push my legs apart and shove himself into me again, and I winced because it hadn’t felt <em>good</em> and the ache inside me was asking for something to feel good. Feel the way it does when I let my hand creep under my shift in bed. When I had imagined him touching me. <em>Could I ask him to touch me like that? Do men do that to women, or only women to ourselves?</em> But Lucille had tried to do it for me. Perhaps men didn’t know about it.</p><p> </p><p>I was about to sit back up, and just <em>ask</em> what happens next, but he nudged one of my legs aside and looked quizzically up at me. Something lit up behind his eyes and he kissed my knee again, then higher up my thigh, and farther, and I thought he meant to kiss up my body to my mouth again—very strange but he had kissed my neck and shoulders, and his moustache and beard tickled me and it made me feel lighter, more relaxed. I bit back on a laugh.</p><p> </p><p>But he didn’t keep kissing up to my waist.</p><p> </p><p>His trail went to the inside of my thigh and then right to my center before I could even contemplate what he meant to be doing. His hands on my thighs holding me down. His lips on me, his <em>tongue</em> doing something akin only in the most basic definition as to what I would use my fingers to do for myself—</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Is this something that people do?! </em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>I tried to focus on the scratch of his beard, the pressure of his hands, the heat of his skin, but it didn’t last long before what he was doing crossed lines from frighteningly strange to viciously pleasurable, to almost painful. There was a moment of genuine concern that I was going to cry, that this wasn’t quite the way it was ever done or supposed to be done, and that this was some torture that he learned in whatever hell it was that spat him out onto the island I found him on.</p><p> </p><p>He lifted his head, with a final long lick against what might have been the most sensitive nerve in my body, just before I had a chance to scream for him to stop. I raised my head to look up to him, and his smile nearly stopped my heart: his lips and beard were wet—<em>wet from me</em>; his eyes were laughing.</p><p> </p><p>“I always wondered how you would taste.”</p><p> </p><p><em>The bastard licked his lips</em>. A devil incarnate. I pushed his head back down to finish the job, and felt him shake with a dark chuckle as his mouth touched me again. It didn’t take long; he was slower this time, and while the peak arrived sooner than the last time, it wasn’t so intense as to become painful, it certainly felt different, more difficult than crashing down from my own touch.</p><p> </p><p>I couldn’t process a rational thought.</p><p> </p><p>I leaned up on my elbows when he drew away, my throat still refusing to grant me voice. Silver licked his lips again. This was enough—for me, but things felt undone and unfinished, and he shifted uneasily around. I didn’t think it was exactly how it was supposed to go, or what he wanted by coming into my cabin, unless he only wanted to do something profane to me.</p><p> </p><p>“Aren’t—Don’t you want to—“ Scott was right, I was a mere girl, in far over her head. But also, I was <em>Silver’s</em> captain. He might be older but I was the powerful one here, even if I didn’t feel like it. “Do you want inside me again?” My knees were shaking, and not from anything he just did.</p><p> </p><p>The look on his face was so unknowable, I wished he would just <em>talk</em> to me—all that talking in the galley of the <em>Hispaniola</em>, in the galley of my <em>Polaris</em>, but now he wouldn’t say a word.</p><p> </p><p>“Silver?”</p><p> </p><p>“Get up, luv,” he grunted, as if—did he expect me to get onto him myself? I don’t know what my face betrayed of my hesitation but he sighed, a miserable sound, rolled his eyes, and wrapped his hand around his shaft, “Don’t—don’t <em>panic, </em>girl. Let me take care of myself?”</p><p> </p><p>It sounded more horrible of a sight to watch than anything he’d do to me—though afterwards I would be curious for days about exactly what it was he meant to do—so I did what seemed in that briefest of seconds the logical action: I grabbed his arm and pulled him <em>hard</em>, leaning back as I did so that he fell over me. His weight supported on his elbows on either side of mine, as his hips were pressed to me. My nipples stiff and sensitive from the cool night air were brushing against his chest. It was almost like being held.</p><p> </p><p>When I was sixteen I had rested with his arm snug around me as the storm settled.</p><p> </p><p>I was not sixteen, and he was pressed against my thigh.</p><p>                     </p><p><em>How did </em>that<em> even </em>fit<em> into me before?</em></p><p> </p><p>Lucille knew so much about this sort of thing—Ben too, apparently, but he was so much less eager to share tales of his lovers, and obviously it wasn’t quite the same with another man, but what was I even supposed to—</p><p> </p><p>“Relax, darlin’…” Silver leaned down, kissed below my ear; his words were barely audible. “’S easier if you’re relaxed,” I swallowed hard, nodded dumbly, and tried to let my tensed body slack into the thin mattress of my bunk. Easy enough. He rocked against me, close enough to his mark that I immediately tensed up; maybe he didn’t think I would be good enough, or fun enough because he tried to move off of me, but with my two legs and two arms I held him down. <em>I’m his captain</em>.</p><p> </p><p>A sharp groan escaped him and I noted that perhaps <em>this</em> was an easier way to do it. I wriggled a little under him, adjusted my legs around his hips. His weight on me wasn’t painful, quite the opposite: it felt real and…comforting.</p><p> </p><p>But still, he didn’t move.</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t let him into my cabin while I was in a nightgown to tell him to never speak of it again.</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t take off that nightgown while he was in front of me to tell him to attend his needs with someone else.</p><p> </p><p>And I didn’t pull him down onto me, and hold him there because I had no interest in keeping him. <em>Mine mine mine mine mine… </em>I leaned up and summoned my broken, strained voice:</p><p> </p><p>“The sea handed you to me on a plate. The very <em>stars</em> are saying you’re with me…”</p><p> </p><p>His reply came in the form of a moan that was tinged with either anger or pleasure, but either way I knew what it was a signal of: recognition and resignation.</p><p>I must have relaxed my hold on him after I said the words, because he realigned himself and rocked into me, almost entirely, then back, and into me again until he was buried in me to the hilt, and the stretch inside almost hurt. I was still slick from what he did with his mouth, so it wasn’t the same pain of entry as in the galley; this movement was easier than that. And he repeated it.</p><p> </p><p>And repeated it again.</p><p> </p><p>And again.</p><p> </p><p>Eventually, the stretch didn’t quite ache, and instead of feeling bad, it felt <em>bizarre,</em> and soon some <em>feeling</em> started, punctuated by moments when one of his thrusts into me would touch some particularly sensitive place, and I didn’t <em>enjoy </em>it just yet but felt some satisfaction in the fact that it was <em>happening</em>. A new tension began to form in my lower body and I held to him tighter.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Relax</em>,” he mumbled, “Or I won’t last much longer.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve already—lasted a <em>while</em>.” I hissed: the build up didn’t hurt, but only barely. I was starting to recognize it as a climb by then: that I was soon to feel something like when I would touch myself.</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, you <em>are</em> easily impressed.”</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t want to remind him that it was only impressive compared to the galley, and risk angering him because everything that happened between the night he taught me the stars and this moment was long gone as heat furled in me, and I couldn’t stop the occasional tensing around his length. The worst of storms could have been brewing outside, tearing my dear <em>Polaris</em> to splinters and I wouldn’t have noticed, just as I hadn’t noticed that I had started arching into him every time he moved, trying to get him to reach those spots that made me feel like tongue did on my nerves.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>“Cabin girl?” his voice was rough and mostly breath: dull and dangerous like a rusted cutlass. I didn’t know what he was asking but I pressed up into him again, and he answered his own unsaid question with harder, faster thrusts and I heard someone—<em>that’s me!—</em>whining as pressure built to a boiling point—the last moments of the rise before the climax, <em>that</em> I well was familiar with.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Baisé sacre…”</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Let me go, I’m—“</p><p> </p><p>I would most certainly <em>not</em> let him go, and I couldn’t fathom why I should ever again. I clung tighter to him, pushed my own hips against his to feel him drag inside me as I pulsed around him—not terribly intense but I had never felt that with another person, with a man inside me, shuddering, and I felt his cock throbbing and then again—he slowed and I felt him spill into me.</p><p> </p><p><em>….Livesey said you can’t have children</em>. <em>It’s fine.</em></p><p> </p><p>I held tight and refused to let him off of me or out of me until we were both breathing steady.</p><p> </p><p>“Where did you learn to curse like that, girl?”</p><p> </p><p>I heard Billy Bones say those words when he dropped a tankard of rum on his foot one night.</p><p> </p><p>“In Marseille,” I answered with the first French port I could think of, though I think Bones spoke something more akin to an American-French dialect, after all he talked about spending time in Louisiana and Georgia and—</p><p> </p><p>“Bloody <em>hell</em>, cabin girl you’re the narrowest strait I’ve ever sailed in...”</p><p> </p><p>I wriggled my hips, not sure if what he was saying was good or bad, but wanting him to keep going. Wanting <em>him </em>to want to do it again. Instead though he rolled off of me, pulling out of me, and our disconnect made a vulgar sound that I would have been utterly repelled by an hour ago.</p><p> </p><p>“Aren’t—“ I gulped. He was lying on his back next to me, making himself right at home on my bunk and on my now-dirty sheets. He folded his arms under his head and sighed, eyes shut, but he made a slight <em>‘hmm?</em>’ noise at my voice. It was the only sign he wasn’t already asleep. “Don’t you want to do it again?”</p><p> </p><p>Silver laughed, turned onto his side, and pushed at me until I was lying on my side as well; what he left in me started to seep out slow and sticky between my thighs and I winced. I thought he must have meant to get me away from him so I couldn’t watch him dress, but instead, his arm wrapped around my waist, and tugged me to him, my spine to his sternum. He kissed the back of my neck lazily.</p><p> </p><p>“Another lesson, darlin’, men aren’t as impressive as you think, and I need at least another eight minutes.”</p><p> </p><p>“Why?”</p><p> </p><p>“…Because that’s how long it takes me, luv? I don’t know the—<em>philosophy</em> of it…”</p><p> </p><p>His arm was <em>very </em>tight around me. I carefully reached one hand below my pillow, up to the head of my bunk against the wall, where I had my knife hidden. I gave it a squeeze with the same sure grip Silver had on me. I held my breath; he did not.</p><p> </p><p><em>He</em> fell <em>asleep</em>, his face in my hair, his arm slowly turning into dead weight.</p><p> </p><p>Once in another life he and I fell asleep on the same bunk, and it had nearly broken my frightened heart that it never happened again. I know now that it was stupid of me, childish and ill thought out, but you see, I knew it then in my cabin too. I knew it was a bad idea, damn the knife in my hand, the ghosts in my head, to let him stay but I did.</p><p> </p><p>I fell asleep far easier than I wanted to admit.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Sorry this took so dreadfully long, but I'm not used to writing citrus like this, and my eyes kept wanting to fall out of my skull during the re-read of it. That, and I've been working ridiculous hours still and haven't had a lot of time to write this month. Chapter 17 is already started, fingers crossed it won't take as long.</p><p>Thank you for the continued and reading and continued responses, I adore you all.</p><p>I have to add once again, that much of this was plotted directly and written along with courtneybgood, who graciously gave me permission to use the material as long as due credit was mentioned again. This chapter would never have happened without that earlier plotting, and I did my best to change internal thought lines and avoid direct quotes.  Thank you again for your permission and support.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. SILVER</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>
    <em>“Why are you doing this?” she asked </em>
  </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>“Because you might—“</em>
  </strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>--Keep me around longer if I’m useful to you.</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>“<em>…a decade when you were born</em>,” </strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Hell, I was easily sailing for that long. I reckoned my age at something between thirty-four and thirty-nine. It was the best I could work out from what what the girls at the house remembered the only time I ever bothered to return.</p><p> </p><p>Arlene didn’t remember me: she offered her wares at half because I was the best looking man in the room. Not a hard thing to be, dockside like that in a house that had fallen into miserable disrepair. Oh, there were nice houses, and at least when my mother was alive, I remember ours being warm, well lit, and clean—three things more you can say about nearly any establishment east of City proper. Broke my black heart it did, to see Arnie there still young, beautiful. I don’t know what made me go back; I had to know it was still there, that it had existed.</p><p> </p><p>She didn’t seem to think much of the fact that she mistook someone she used to bounce on her knee at the dinner table for a prospective customer. Money was money, and a man was a man, so long as I wasn’t too old—her father was a sailor, she knew that much, and as such wouldn’t serve any more than fourteen years or so older than herself. Just to be sure, or so she claimed. I always suspected it was an easy way to avoid the worst of the work.</p><p> </p><p>Jane was the only sister I really cared for who was left there, and she had died of pox three years earlier, Arnie said, like it was business. They treated Bess the same way, so I don’t know why it shocked me.</p><p> </p><p>It <em>was</em> business. She made tea that tasted of copper and shit, but didn’t offer me anything else. Asked where I had vanished off to, if I knew where Bess went (dead, fever, ten years ago), but she didn’t really seem to care. Others came down after customers were ushered out.</p><p> </p><p>Sarah (condescending bitch) gave me one of Jane’s hair ribbons, some Latin scripture stitched into it that I only knew because I remembered when Jane sewed them. I gaped at her. I <em>owned</em> the house. I could put them all out and they could work alleys instead of beds, and they thought to send me on my way with a scrap of lace and velvet?</p><p> </p><p>Jane’s daughters--the oldest, Kat, easily no more than fifteen and painted to match the rest of the women, working too—looked at me holding that fucking scrap of silk and wool with a hatred I hadn’t ever seen on their mother’s face. And <em>fear</em>.</p><p> </p><p>What else to do? I put up the fuss that they expected, said the lot of them owed me, and chance of blood or no, I should have a turn by each, but it was all threats. I didn’t want the house, didn’t want to bed any of the women who bloody raised me. Jane’s younger daughter glared at me like she would kill me if we were more matched in height.</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t give her the ribbon, and it’s not because I knew the comb in her hair was once her mother’s. I didn’t care. My own mother told Jane to drop her first born off at the foundling’s hospital—Jane raised me in place of her abandoned son, raised Bess too like we were her own.</p><p> </p><p>It’s funny. I never thought that I would end up like them—course I <em>knew</em> there were houses of boys and young men, but Jane kept trying to teach me letters, though she barely knew them herself. I had a head for numbers though, and cooked on the nights when all my sisters were busy or working or out. I even knew how to quiet a crying infant—for the rare ones my mother let the girls keep—and <em>without</em> dosing them with gin as her or Sarah would. People either trusted me instantly, or else knew that I wasn’t to be left alone for too long or ever trusted with too sharp of a knife. I was clever. And quick.</p><p> </p><p>Quick enough when an old sailor, one of the few usuals who still asked for my mother instead of one of the younger set, tried to get out without paying in full, I did the math in my head—even though he was using Spanish coins to pay. I knew every type of coin and it’s worth in the world; sailors used all sorts of things and any form of money was gladly taken at Ms. Silver’s Inn for Young Widows.</p><p> </p><p>I didn’t lie to Jim when I told her I grew up at an inn too.</p><p> </p><p>Anyway, the old seadog—who might have been my father, might not have, we didn’t look much alike but the eyes—says to me he owns a few ships, and when I’m old enough to load one of the guns, he’d take me on as cabin boy. As for what it paid? He dropped a few extra coins into my outstretched hand.</p><p> </p><p>Should have told Pew to shove his extra coins up his—</p><p> </p><p><em>Oh the funny part! </em>I almost forgot where this was going. SO!</p><p> </p><p>I did my time as cabin boy, sharp and shrewd and I shot a man off the ratlines of an approaching ship when I was twelve. They were pirates, Pew owned pirate ships. What a great time, and a better place for a boy to grow up than a brothel. You could say ‘what’s the difference?’, but the difference was when I was fourteen in Madagascar, a common port for Pew, and we’re all out and having a grand time, and someone says to me I wouldn’t know what to do with the attention I was trying to give to the tavern maids in one of the English establishments. Pirate settlements—first time I met Flint. I lost track of my age at that point. Thirteen to fifteen, no older but I doubt younger.</p><p> </p><p>Pirate settlements thick with taverns and houses of pleasure and shacks where a man could retire to, fish for his dinner and repair nets for his pay—not too bad, considering the alternative was usually a sea burial by the age of thirty, or a noose.</p><p> </p><p>Pew tells me he wants to introduce me to one of his captains, thinks I’d be a good placement for him—have to mention first: I killed a few men by then, on boarding parties and with long guns, but I slit a merchant’s throat on Pew’s orders that previous chase, and he was proud as punch, and for the first time started acting like he was with certainty my father, not my employer.</p><p> </p><p>--Don’t make the mistake of thinking I ever cared. I don’t. Joan told me Pew was dead after the raid on the Benbow, and I didn’t give a damn. Good riddance to the bastard, and if it turned out he <em>was </em>my father I’d have just said it twice. Rot in hell with the rest of them.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p><em>Anyway</em>, it’s Pew telling me to come into the tavern by the jungle’s edge, smells like opium smoke and burning sugar, and there’s a man in a black leather long coat and an old navy hat at a big chair next to him, and this man’s got a woman on each knee.</p><p> </p><p>I’d messed around in my life, but never made it so far—but Pew, the grizzled looking man in the coat, and some officers were all leering at the bar maids, and I did what I could, let my hand rest on the shoulder of the woman who poured me a grog—not the full rum that the other men were drinking. Apparently, I reached for the wrong target because next I knew, the men were all laughing and Pew said something along the lines of ‘boy wouldn’t know where to stick it,’ and so I stop talking. Made an ass of myself, probably lost the position on the ship that Pew kept harping about. Fine.</p><p> </p><p>We’re all about to leave, some men sleeping on the ship, some men sleeping in whores’ beds, or mistresses’ beds, and I shrug off the loss and head out when narrow-shoulders and long black hair stops me by <em>my </em>shoulder, and tells me that I’m very pretty, and it’s a shame, those things the men said. She’ll teach me, if that’s what I’m after.</p><p> </p><p>I told her I couldn’t pay.</p><p> </p><p><em>“I’m the one asking; I’ll pay you, pretty.</em>”</p><p> </p><p>And <em>that’s</em> the punch line! Gorgeous woman dragging little me by the wrist into the rainforest undergrowth, riding me through the worst orgasm of my life and dropping her night’s wages into my coat pocket when she was done. <em>Pretty</em>. My mother would have been so proud.</p><p> </p><p>So I said to Pew when I came back, I didn’t want to go with the bastard who was mocking me, and Pew said well <em>hell</em>, you’re going. I think he might have sold me to him, but I don’t know. Pew didn’t trust me none by that point: I was too quiet, I <em>thought</em> too much. To be fair, it wasn’t just him being paranoid: I was actively planning on killing him for his ship at some point. Maybe not that year, but eventually.</p><p> </p><p>Serving under Flint—or, over Flint (that’s a joke too)—wasn’t what I wanted, and I could have done worse. But I lost whatever vestiges of morality I had clinging to my ribcage that Jane and a few other well-meaning sisters wanted to pretend I had in spades. I was given a chance to get <em>creative</em> with my methods, and made a time for myself by the time I was twenty-five.</p><p> </p><p>Lost my leg before I was thirty, by my guess. And my officer’s share of the treasure, regulated to the kitchen that I had already long taken charge of. No point in eating the slop they ate in England when there was a whole world of rich things for the taking out there. What’s more to that? I killed Flint after he buried his cache; chased Bones back across at the Atlantic, from London to Cardiff to Bristol. Finally three years later or so, found him in some godforsaken backwater costal village where he had been trying to hide.</p><p> </p><p>Then the chase again. The treasure. Marooned for the second time in my life, and what did anything else then matter between there and <em>Captain</em> Hawkins’ southern seas?</p><p> </p><p>Men born to hang can never drown and mark me I’ll meet my end on a rope or a sword, but at least I won this last prize.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Chapter 18</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Even though closed eyes, I could tell that the sun rose slowly peaking through either clouds or fog, humiliated to be seen looking in on the sight. I didn’t move, having barely slept, touching my knife every time I inched closer to awareness about my <em>situation</em>. The body behind mine was so <em>warm</em> that it was almost stifling, or would be if the air of the cabin wasn’t so cold. And the body was also <em>snoring</em>.</p><p> </p><p>I let the night play over and over. The dirty sheets, the mess, and it was <em>sticky</em>, and <em>him</em> between me and my only escape route. What a wonderful circle for my life to take—bitter? Somewhat. It was trying to outrun fate, and I couldn’t even sort out if I <em>liked</em> it or not, if—well. I couldn’t care about him quite like a wife, and this was the sort of position that only a wife should be in, but I doubt he had such concerns, and I certainly didn’t but—</p><p> </p><p>Slowly, I turned onto my back, trying to keep my breathing even. I did my best to avoid thinking about the arm still tossed over my waist—I still hadn’t even opened my eyes. It was absurd, I know, but he was supposed to be dead after all, and I was afraid as Psyche that he had turned into something monstrous as he slept, horns, scales, teeth. So you can imagine my shock when I finally blinked by accident and noticed that not only was he still human, he looked…<em>younger</em>. The lines in his face had relaxed and he was unguarded; this was no character, no myth, no <em>threat</em>. This was just a man. He also smelled awful, but I likely didn’t seem much better: my bottle of rose water nearing the end, and short of scrubbing down with saltwater, there wasn’t much to be done about it on a ship. After a couple months, the smell doesn’t even occur to sailors. Cities smelled worse anyway, and we could at least stand under rain. And under the awful staleness of being at sea, Silver still smelled—<em>like kitchen spices…</em></p><p> </p><p>As long as he stayed asleep, I could just rest, and study and read him, and wonder if he had taken my words to heart about wanting my sailors kept neat that he had seemed freshly shaved and his beard and moustache trimmed—or if he had done it because he was coming to see me. Did he think that he was going to do that with his mouth, or was that impulse—I still couldn’t fathom if that was something that people <em>did</em> or something that only <em>he</em> did. Surely not something good or polite men knew how to do.</p><p>….Warm against me under my sheets in my cold cabin. Damn my authority, damn his age.</p><p> </p><p>A beam of sunlight from under my grey curtains crept across the floor and over the bed, over his face, and his eyes opened, unseeing for a moment, then soft, searching, and perhaps even confused. But—once he caught sight of me, he immediately tore out of bed and looked around for his crutch, and then his clothes in quick order.</p><p> </p><p>The light made it indecent, and I looked away, listening to him quickly fasten the belts and buckles of his false leg. I sat up, holding the sheets to my chest, as if <em>that</em> meant anything anymore, not when I stole a glance at him half dressed, and caught him looking at me in fear.</p><p> </p><p>“You’d think you’re the one who woke up next to a murderer,” I said, uncomfortable of playing it as a joke, but not wanting him to take it rudely either. He grunted something that was probably meant to be words, but I didn’t bother trying to make sense of them.</p><p> </p><p>“Men will be waiting in the galley,” he finally stated clearly. “Your hounds will be after me for shirking duties,” I noticed, as he fixed a few pockets and his belt over his trousers, the glint of at least two knives.</p><p> </p><p>“I locked you up for the night for drunkenness.” I said with a deep sigh. I couldn’t lie, but I could get him to lie. Not that it wasn’t already part and parcel with his nature, or difficult for him to do.</p><p> </p><p>“….Alright,” he agreed, and I could see him become increasingly scattered, reach up to touch the thin scarf he always kept tied around his throat, but it wasn’t there.</p><p> </p><p>It was on the bed still, he never bothered to take it off last night. I rose, forgoing the sheets. The cold was biting, but the shame bit harder.</p><p> </p><p>I caught him by the wrist, and he spun around on his good heal to face me, a flash of anger for me slowing him down.</p><p> </p><p>“Your tie,” I reached up behind him, looped it around his neck and tied it in a simple knot, tucking the ends under his ragged shirt. My fingers lingered on the worn, soft linen of his collar. “Turner said that pirates think touching someone’s collar before parting will keep their necks safe at sea. Have you heard that?”</p><p> </p><p>“Achingly sentimental. Doesn’t do any good. Better to have a set of eyes to look out for you, someone at your back that won’t stab you in it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Why should I trust you not to stab me in the back?”</p><p> </p><p>“Thought we came to an agreement, I check you’re your moves. You look like a fantastic captain, but you don’t trust me still.” It wasn’t a question, and he grinned, like he was proud of the fact that I was still intimidated by him.</p><p> </p><p>“Not a bit,” his grin faded back into his previous annoyance and he was gone, past the partition between my bunk and my state room, and out the main door to the deck, slamming it shut behind himself.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>So <em>little</em> seemed to have changed. I filled a bucket with some of my dwindling stash of soap flakes, and dropped in the sheets. I washed myself with vinegar and then water. <em>What if?</em></p><p> </p><p>I dismissed it as unlikely. The universe wouldn’t be so cruel as to put me through that too. I stood still again before my silver mirror, let the ship rock under me, let the salt air overpower <em>his</em> scent, and shut my eyes. The sea, the sky, my home and anchor.</p><p> </p><p>Trelawney’s mocking voice in my head from my last visit to Black Cove: “<em>Jim’s married to the sea</em>,” and it was meant as teasingly insulting, but I took such pride in it. Like any man, like any sailor, my first and last true love was the open water.</p><p> </p><p>My ocean, my <em>Polaris</em>.</p><p> </p><p>They were still <em>mine. </em>This body was still mine—even, as I looked at the red mark he left on my neck. But the marks on my body would fade, my body would heal—<em>I </em>was not changed in some dark, celestial way. If anything I felt…tired. It had been ages since Lucille and I shared a room in Bath, and I <em>liked</em> having someone close. Under the dullness of sleep, I’d have never remembered who or what he was, or what he had done, he was merely warm and solid and grounding—if only I had been able to stay soundly asleep. <em>Perhaps next time</em>—</p><p> </p><p>No, no…</p><p> </p><p>Having someone around always made me feel real. If someone would notice I left, then I must have existed. Not like the children in Sunday school where I learned to read and was promptly pulled to help with the inn—I saw some of the children the following summer while playing in the woods, and not one of them remembered my name, or who I was. Who was alive now to remember my siblings? Were they real? My parents were gone, and I hardly remembered them, just distant stories of my grandmother’s. Her husband she loved so much, dead before the fever took most of the family—of nothing more than old age and a hard life at sea. I was their keeper and I was so close to not existing at all.</p><p> </p><p>Silver acted like he didn’t know who I was in that bar. Lucille looked at me at her wedding like we were merely old friends. Ben <em>shook my hand</em> rather than hug me at Grandma’s funeral dinner. Livesey so busy with her new practice in the city; the squire always flighty despite being so well meaning. My cabin girls who came and went despite their love of my stories.</p><p> </p><p>A ship in a busy harbor there in the morning and gone in the evening, I was nothing to no one and letting him in my cabin let me feel real and wanted for an hour or so, but that must have been all it was.</p><p> </p><p>I dressed, against the cold that I could feel from the inside out, and even though I had nice (not <em>fine,</em> but <em>nice)</em> ties and scarves in my wardrobe to wear to cover the bruise on my neck, I still had a distant thought that I could have worn his if I hadn’t given it to him. Then again, his tattered scrap of red would have sold me out in an instant to my men. The look on my face was likely to do it as well, so I opted to avoid the galley until I could trust myself not to look at Silver any differently, as if I wasn’t trying to solve the puzzles of his scars and his past and his sea hawk tattoo.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thank you for sticking around, and thank you for your continued support and comments. I have this now fully plotted up through chapter thirty, and a vague concept of where it goes after that, and two options for an epilogue. The end isn't in sight exactly, but the plot is coming soon....</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. SILVER</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There was a dead man talking in the corner, leaning on the musket he had across his lap, and leering at Jim despite the fact he had oozing jelly for eyes, and his flesh was as shredded as any carcass underwater would get.</p><p> </p><p>“Shove off….” I mumbled once I was standing between her and his line of sight.</p><p> </p><p>“She looks like a miserable time,” I ignored him. Jim couldn’t see him, hear him. Her expression was likely at my own sail-worn body and the growing understanding of last night.</p><p> </p><p>No one else ever saw Captain Flint. I figured that out within a week of dumping his body in the harbor. If the crocodiles didn’t have him, I hope he was fished out and buried on land in a potter’s field, never to smell the salt air or feel the wind off the ocean again. No, Jim would never have to set eyes on the talking corpse: when Flint bothered to haunt me, the bastard was never visible to others.</p><p> </p><p>I avoided acknowledging him until I left her cabin. Her touch on my collar, her <em>childish</em> words of well-wishing, I wanted to be back in her bed, back in<em> her</em>…</p><p> </p><p>The dead captain followed, mocking my limp as I climbed back down to the galley. It was still early, but I could hear movements on the ship, just on the other end of the deck; food wouldn’t be ready but the cold stew from last night wasn’t spoiled yet, having sat on embers for the night. I stoked the furnace and put ever flat-bottomed pan I had on the top of it, an easy batter poured on them, five minutes each, they’ll be a little burned on the bottom but some molasses thinned with warm water will be close enough to the New World maple syrup Paula had used at her tavern on hotcakes. To make enough for the crew I’d need an hour. Fuck.</p><p> </p><p>Jim’s excuse: she had locked me up for drunkenness. Not my preferred cover story, but she can’t have her crew thinking she’s been having me. Not with a gunner looking for any excuse to use my eyes as target practice. Not with Jim’s doctor, that pesky mouse of a man she’s made pet out of, always lurking about. The salt of my own sweat stung the raw scratches she left on my back.</p><p> </p><p>“You always said you liked women,” Flint sniffed at the griddle despite lacking a nose. “Not the youths,”</p><p> </p><p>“She’s a grown woman.”</p><p> </p><p>“She looks like a young boy,”</p><p> </p><p>“She <em>doesn’t</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“Or an ugly girl-child.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Leave me alone</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“Have you gotten a taste for younger flesh then, Silver? Or is it just your refusal to pay? You aren’t pretty anymore, women won’t give it to you for free.”</p><p> </p><p>“The young ones were always <em>your </em>choice. And I <em>rarely</em> pay for it, even now, thank you.”</p><p> </p><p>I was <em>going</em> to pay for it. I had Hell to pay, literally, for laying the cabin girl in her own bed. Captain. For laying the <em>captain</em> in her own bed.</p><p> </p><p>“You have a good point. I could go haunt her for a while,”</p><p> </p><p>“She can’t see you”</p><p> </p><p>“No, but you can see me, and you can see me watch her.” He inspects the thinned molasses, as if he knows anything about cooking other than lighting a fire. “Your viewpoint must not have allowed it but did you see how she cried last night?”</p><p> </p><p>“She was—overwhelmed,” I hated to admit that it dug at me. Even five years earlier my plan was to take her gently, kindly if I could manage it, some way that she would enjoy it enough that I could have her whenever I wanted. If I would have held her up against the galley wall she would have fought, and run.</p><p> </p><p>Jim shaking like a loose sail under my arm during that storm.</p><p> </p><p>Jim shaking apart under me like she damned well should have five years ago.</p><p> </p><p>She wasn’t <em>upset</em>, last night, she wasn’t—no matter what Flint said, <em>she</em> pulled me down onto her eagerly, that’s what it was, that’s what happened, that’s what we <em>had</em>.</p><p> </p><p>I wanted her and it was mutual despite being so unlikely, and I would need to figure out how to play her high-strung nerves, morals, and her young, inexperienced lust in my favor. It worked so far, but the devil only knows <em>how</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Her body fit to mine naturally; her little hands on my back, her mouth either busy or speaking—answering that question I’ve had for so long, would she silence for a decent roll in the sheets, or not? Decidedly <em>not</em>. There was no performance to it, just the fact that she never <em>stops</em>, voicing every feeling and question and thought, and I had never had a woman quite like that.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>…I never willingly fucked a captain either.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. Chapter 20</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Took me long enough! Thank you all three of you for still reading. I am writing this for my own enjoyment but knowing others like it enough to stick around is incredibly validating.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>
    <em>My favorite friend, </em>
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</p><p>
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</p><p>
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    <em>That’s absolutely not true, I don’t start all my letters like that. You know you’re my favorite friend—</em>
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</p><p>
  
</p><p>I hadn’t called Ben my best friend, not once. The scars from the last time I had a best friend were still too fresh, and even as Ben told me I was his, I could never repeat it.</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong><em>--Besides, who else is there? The squire has his fancy friends; Dr. Livesey prefers to lecture me on my career path, and how the inn would be so much more inviting if I were to stay there. But she never did it to you? Has she? Did she ever tell you that if you would just come home from school, the inn would feel like home. It </em>would<em> but I couldn’t ask that of you. We are, against all reason, adults following our own stars. I cannot begrudge you of that. </em></strong>
</p><p>
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</p><p>
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    <em>Anyway you’re the only person who gets the address of my favorite friend. I can always trust you and know that I have you.---</em>
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</p><p> </p><p>It wasn’t true. He had his learned friends from university, and the artist friends of his <em>flatmate</em> Charles. I wouldn’t be shocked if Ben had forgotten all about me, forgotten about the Benbow and the old coat he left behind, the few books in his room and spare pens as if to promise me that he would come <em>back</em>. But there was no one else I could talk to. I <em>could</em> talk to Lucille, I suppose, if I was nearby, but I doubt she would want to see me now. Last I saw her she acted as if I was just an old <em>flame</em> rather than a friend—and what’s the point of that?</p><p> </p><p>Grandma told me never to marry if I couldn’t have a conversation with the man. Her and my grandfather used to walk down to the beach. I don’t remember ever seeing them having a conversation, but I don’t remember much at all from when I was that small. I remember my brothers, my infant sister; I remember tumbling about with other children barely old enough to walk. I remember waking up in my brother’s cold arms, some grown-up carrying me to a spare room and putting me in a clean bed with a pan of coals under the mattress so I didn’t freeze to death.</p><p> </p><p>That’s a lie—I barely remember the smells and screaming, but for overhearing some of Livesey’s conversations with others about what happened to me. <em>Poor orphan girl</em>. But I remember ghosts in my parents shape, never one far from the other in the evenings, and I remember how happy they were, even when we were starving and sick, I remember the sound their intertwining laughter made.</p><p> </p><p>Ben and I could laugh together, and I saw the light of hope in my grandmother’s eyes as she wondered if we would become something. I had hoped too, bored afternoons in the warm sun, hiding in tall grass. Ben had been growing a beard, and moustache. Grandma said he looked like a criminal or an artist; he asked me what I thought.</p><p> </p><p>I told him we should walk outside.</p><p> </p><p>Those first kisses were light and silly: children teasing, daring each other. Ben was no more a child than I was—less even, he was likely a few years older than I, one of the many reasons he feared getting caught by Grandma. Then we somewhat understood the motions, the tilt, and after we could stop laughing long enough to finish a kiss, we tried to convince ourselves to part our lips, and we tried to convince ourselves we wanted each other.</p><p> </p><p>I told him to stop talking, kiss me harder, and don’t ask me to open my eyes again.</p><p> </p><p>Grandma told him to shave a few days later, or she would do it for him. Like a good grandson, he complied, and I had no more interest in kissing him, but it was fine. I didn’t think he really liked kissing me; and I found out that for certain (and the reason why) not a full two months later, but by then he had been preparing for school, and the squire had asked if I could accompany his niece for a holiday in Bath.</p><p> </p><p>Lucille’s soft hands and latest gowns contrasted to my callouses and tailored suits (one bought, one gifted), and she, Ben, and a few of the women in Lucille’s circle called me <em>handsome</em>. Handsome.</p><p> </p><p>Only one person ever told me I was pretty.</p><p> </p><p>There was no future with Lucille as it was; her betrothed (James,<em> Jim</em>, as if it wasn’t enough of an insult to know it was a man) and she were smitten. I was one last wild thing to have before becoming a proper lady—and apparently I let her down when I read her invitations to bed as merely wanting to share the warmth in cool evenings.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>--I always do mean to write you to inquire how your studies are treating you, how you find life among the student lodgings of school, about Charles, about fine things and art and science, and about you, but I cannot lie even in ink to say that’s why I’m writing you now. I’ve been having nightmares again, the kind I used to tell you about—</em>
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</p><p> </p><p>I never did tell him about the dreams; about scratchy kisses on parts of my body I didn’t think could or should be kissed, about blood stained hands leaving me red, red all over, always <em>touching</em> always <em>taking</em> but those were dreams were I <em>gave</em> freely. Rolling onto my stomach to imagine that the pressure of the mattress below me was weight lying on top of me instead. His ghost in hell below me, watching maybe, and that thought would make me cry through even the rarely satisfying end.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>--<em>and I wondered if you could tell me anything. He didn’t kill you, but he could have, and was told to do so. It was cruel and cowardly to let you hide on the island but he still failed to do it himself. I need to know that that wasn’t a mistake on his part, that if he comes back to haunt me that my death won’t be his purpose. </em></strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>I’m not seeing ghosts, but I have to have some—there were no parting words, and not for you either, and I’m sorry that you lost a friend, a brother, a father even, but I—</em>
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</p><p>
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</p><p>My stupid childish heart was half in love with the first bastard to treat me like I was my own intelligent person and not a talking beer keg or a duster or a baby.</p><p> </p><p>No, that’s exactly what it was. I think I <em>was</em> more than merely infatuated with him, and maybe Ben knew that already, and Grandma might have guessed from my reluctance to talk about him but—</p><p> </p><p>But when the call of <em>Land-ho! </em>came that night, Livesey had stood by me (her hands clasped behind her pin-straight back) and said <em>“Remember this well, Jim. Some day you’ll tell your children about this evening.”</em> And in that moment, I had panicked and thought she meant that I would tell my children about Silver showing me the stars, that she had seen us. My mouth, for once, didn’t open first. My brain had blessedly stopped the words as quickly as my heart formed them: <em>of course we’ll tell our children about it.</em> The thought shocked me into silence. Did I mean it? Did I want that with him? I didn’t want it with anyone, I didn’t want folktales by a hearth and cups of tea, I didn’t want a routine and guests and dinners and the bloody inn, and I didn’t want a hoard of rowdy children with <em>anyone</em>, but that was still the thought that immediately came to me.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>--I lost the first person to ever treat me like I was important. Perhaps if you could tell me something, anything not horrific that you remember, it could make this easier for me. Ease my nightmares some how. I would be able to think of him as less than a monster, and more of just a man, a dead man, who cannot touch me—</em>
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</p><p> </p><p>I scrawled out the last few words.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>--who cannot hurt me. I’ll post this as soon as I reach port, and perhaps before next Christmastime we’ll have a chance to meet in person. I really do miss you, and I hope your nightmares have stayed farther away than mine. Give Charles my best.</em>
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</p><p>
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</p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>Love, </em>
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</p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>Jim. </em>
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</p><p>
  <strong>
    
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</p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>P.S. on the subject of him, I have gotten his English stew recipe down perfect—not the stuff he would make on the return from the West Indies—</em>
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</p><p>
  
</p><p>How would I know that? Rather than blot out any more, I amended:</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>--not the stuff you told me about, but what he made in Bristol just as we departed. That stuff that was mostly potatoes but would still warm you like cozy quilt. It was a pepper, we were right, but not a kind that you can find in England. The secret was ONE dried and ground—</em>
  </strong>
</p><p> </p><p>“Silver?”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Why</em> are you still awake, girl?” the words came in a miserable, irked growl from my bunk.</p><p> </p><p>“What was the pepper you used on the east-side stew again?”</p><p> </p><p>“Jim, I have—likely no more than two hours before I start cooking would you <em>please</em> come back to bed.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m writing it down. It wasn’t a—it wasn’t the green one I can’t pronounce, it was yellow,”</p><p> </p><p>“Scotch bonnet, darling, <em>come back to bed</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>I ignored him. I would take no orders in my own cabin, even if he was right, and he would shuffle out of here well before dawn, leaving me asleep.</p><p> </p><p>He always kissed me before he left. I never opened my eyes until he leaves, because I didn’t know what meant by it, but he always kissed the first spot of my bare skin he could reach before he’d climb out of my bed. I didn’t think he wanted me to notice.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>--ONE dried and ground Scotch Bonnet pepper. I’ve procured some that I will leave at the inn with Eliza’s daughter for when you come back. They should last quite a while in this form, so don’t worry about rushing home. </em>
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</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>
    <em>I really do miss you, and hope that you can give me some help in this. Love, J. </em>
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</p><p> </p><p>“Are you writin’ a recipe or an entire book on my cooking?”</p><p> </p><p>“Wouldn’t you just love me to do that?”</p><p> </p><p>“I might. I <em>might</em>….”</p><p> </p><p>Silver couldn’t read, and I knew that it was true. It would have been like him to lie about not being able to read as to seem somehow less intelligent and therefore less threatening, but I had seen him puzzled over signs and crates, and I had to send Anderson into the hold in his stead when he needed something, as he couldn’t read the labels on anything. It caused him too much annoyance to be a lie.</p><p> </p><p>I left my letter to dry on my desk.</p><p> </p><p>“Two hours…” I repeated. I paused a moment just to breathe, focused on the sea sounds and ship sounds that usually comprised the background noise that was baseline for all else when you’re out on the water. An orchestra of creaks, waves, groans, distant birds, and some endless echoing of the ocean itself: whale-like, bolder than a shell to the ear but of the same class of music.</p><p> </p><p>And with that symphony for a lullaby and witness, I shouldered off my dressing gown, climbed into bed (<em>arm under pillow, toward the wall, touch the knife, swiftly retreat as I turn over, knife still there, still unmoved, still safe, I’m still safe</em>), and smiled as my nightmare slipped his fingers between my legs.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Stay tuned both here and on discord for the recipe for Silver's stew. </p><p>I've been doing some research onto the time period and also Caribbean cooking and some trial and error in my kitchen. Hopefully I'll have it for you in time for the holidays!</p><p> </p><p>also there is like....an actual plot coming (I might be closer to fifty chapters when all is said and done...) Some characters just have to have a few conversations first.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Chapter 21</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>LONG TIME NO POST.</p><p>I swore that this was going to make a come back, I just had some other things that required my attentions. I'm hoping to be....slightly less absent on this fic. </p><p>Thanks to those of you still here in one of the world's smallest (but best) fandoms.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I <em>swear</em> I only meant to use him.</p><p> </p><p>I wanted to have…I <em>wanted to feel</em>. I wanted to be a bloody <em>adult</em>, I wanted my girl-self, still sixteen, to feel desire fulfilled and I wanted to feel for just <em>a couple hours</em> what it might be like if he had been a worse person on the <em>Hispaniola</em>—</p><p> </p><p>I meant to use him for <em>that</em> much before he vanished from my ship and my life again.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>I didn’t <em>think</em> he wanted to kill me. At least if he originally wanted to, he didn’t anymore, even if it was only because I was more enjoyable alive. Maybe that’s all he was playing at. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who wanted to know what the other felt like, even if it was a bad idea.</p><p> </p><p>Once a week or so, he would invite himself into my cabin after the late watch, when the deck was empty. There would be some pretense, he would want to see our route, want to <em>talk</em> about some argument that Scott tried to pull him into, or some bit of gossip he overheard. Otherwise, he would want my opinion on something he cooked that day. It didn’t matter, conversation would wrap around us tighter and tighter, drag us across a thousand more subjects—facts and stories only, never a detail about ourselves—until eventually, one of us moved too close to the other.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Grandma feared the God of England (though my grandfather feared none); my mother honored some spirits of water and waves with names I don’t remember, but I begged each and every one for the strength to tell him to get the hell out of my staterooms.</p><p> </p><p>That second time, I told him it was about time he should leave, if he doesn’t want to be noticed. He left without a goodbye, good morning, or even a scowl. Matter-of-fact and practical, he dressed and left. I cleaned up. I went back to bed for an hour.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After that we had a few sporadic meetings in the galley. And in the storage. The larder. Once, outside my ship’s single-cell brig. I got a bar-shaped bruise on my shoulder from that one.</p><p> </p><p>The third time he came to my cabin, he fell asleep again, and would not be woken until nearly dawn. I felt movement beside me, he kissed my shoulder fleetingly enough I thought I dreamt it. And again, he dressed and left, and I had waited for as long as I could tolerate.</p><p> </p><p>The fourth time, I admit that <em>I</em> fell asleep, because it was the night after the third time and I was tired. I had nightmares of a knife in my back for days after.</p><p> </p><p>The fifth time, I gave up.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>I woke from a dream of digging through stone to find a severed hand, familiar, bits of a tattoo I knew well, the wrist I pressed my lips to, fingers that had caressed me and held me, that had slipped into me and coaxed me apart—dripping blood and still clutching at gold.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The weather was colder the farther north we sailed, and I didn’t mind the body in my bed, warm as fever. Dawn approached; the sky would be shifting from bottle-of-blue-ink to cornflower on the eastern horizon; Venus high, proud, trying her damnedest to compete with the rising sun.</p><p> </p><p>But I would see none of it, greedy by then too, for the last few moments of uneasy comfort I had with his heat at my back. Each time he woke like clockwork, just in time to quietly, hastily rush out. I always tried to be awake too, so I could feel that strange thing, his parting kiss on my neck or shoulder—</p><p> </p><p>His ritual changed that morning, a dry brush of lips, scratchy mustache, scratchy beard on the back of my shoulder, but he continued, leaving a short trail of something like a kiss before he shifted behind me I felt his hardening interest.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Shit.</em>” I wasn’t meant to hear it, or be awake at all, I assumed as he rolled off my bed.</p><p> </p><p>“Silver? ‘S fine, you can if you want…” it really <em>wasn’t</em> fine, I was half asleep, and still trying to figure out what he was getting at, what his purpose here was, and how was I going to sleep ever again after he inevitably vanishes in Bristol?</p><p> </p><p>“I—got work to do. Go back to sleep.” <em>Don’t beg him</em>.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Stay</em>.” It was an order; I had to tell myself that. I had (and still have) to think that it was a moment where I felt like I had come into my own with him; not a moment where I showed too much of my little girl’s heart and needed company, needed a friend, needed <em>him</em> to keep holding me.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ve got—“ I caught his wrist; that tattoo of rope under my hand, Scott had one too: superstition, it kept one from falling from the rigging. Anderson had <em>HOLD FAST</em> across his knuckles for the same myth.</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve got last night’s leftovers and my spoiled crew doesn’t need fresh bread every morning. They’ll live, and you’re sleeping away a hangover in the lower decks. It’s Sunday. No one’s to work for a few more hours yet.”</p><p> </p><p>“Jim—“</p><p> </p><p>“And there’s at least an hour before someone will call for me! And you want me, don’t you?” my fingers tapped the rope tattoo, a branding scar of a ‘P’ above it, closer to the elbow, where a another tattoo of an anchor and a set of coordinates lay. “That’s London. Was it your home port?” he looked incredulous; still sitting up, the sheet contoured to the fact that even if he denied it, his body certainly wanted him to stay in my bed.</p><p> </p><p>“Let me see you.”</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“You want to know anything about my marks? I want to see yours,” his eyes were hungry still, but <em>soft</em>. He was lying, or distracting me.</p><p> </p><p>It wasn’t lost on me that Silver had only ever seen me naked in full daylight once, and not below the waist. My lamp that first night; the nights since then, or else shadows below deck…</p><p> </p><p>“I—I only have two tattoos, I—“</p><p> </p><p>“Where?” a glint of a smile, and that was easier to work with than anything that inched towards emotion with him.</p><p> </p><p>It was easier standing up, and I crawled to the end of the bunk, facing him, but stopped. I leaned against the footboard, my two legs stretched out beside his one.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ve got a bird, on the back of my shoulder,” I twisted slightly to show him, “Just a little one,” nothing like the two intricate barn swallows on his chest, standing for five thousand nautical miles a piece. No one on my ship that I’ve noticed has <em>two </em>of them. “Supposedly it’s to help me find my way home, even when if I’m lost,” and he <em>must</em> have seen it, considering he’s kissed it before.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re too smart to ever get lost. Don’t need a bird for that, you’ve got your stars.”</p><p> </p><p>“I have those too! My other one it’s—“ I turned the other direction, ursa minor in blue on my hip. I squinted in the half-light to try and make out more of his, a rose on a thorny vine on his side, weaving between and around scars; a shark on his right bicep and a sea hawk on his left.</p><p> </p><p>“I had a mermaid on the other leg, she was holding a skull and sitting on a pile of gold,” there was a kraken on his right thigh, bringing down a ship. Impressive line work, but the thought that the artist spent that much time that close to his skin made me burn. What if she was a woman? What if they were not a woman, but like myself Silver has no preference?</p><p> </p><p>I knew he’s likely had lovers in every port of the world, but in that moment I had wanted to think that I was the only one who had read all the stories written on his body.</p><p> </p><p>“Have you ever seen a mermaid?”</p><p> </p><p>“They’re not <em>real</em>,”</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t know everything—And, Clara, she said—“</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t,” he said, with a huff, reaching forward to me; when I noted he meant to drag me up towards him, I crawled up the bed again, “Want to talk about <em>her</em> or mermaids,”</p><p> </p><p>“What do you want to talk about?”</p><p> </p><p>He grinned.</p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>Halfway through my crew’s Sunday morning off, and we still hadn’t managed to dress. His fingers traced a few thin scars down my back.</p><p> </p><p>“What are these from?”</p><p> </p><p>“I fell out of a tree when I was eleven.”</p><p> </p><p>“Is how you got the scars on your arse too?”</p><p> </p><p>“No, they’re from when the pastor’s son kicked me, so I chased him with a rock. We both tripped into the creek in the woods, and I got scraped up. The ridge on my right elbow is from that too,” Livesey had to wrap it tight in gauze to keep me from moving it while it healed, as the skin there was too tight to stitch.</p><p> </p><p>“Did you get him?”</p><p> </p><p>“I threw the rock and missed, but he still cried,”</p><p> </p><p>“Good girl. Always knew you must have been a nightmare as a child.”</p><p> </p><p>“….I was sixteen.”</p><p> </p><p>He laughed against my spine, and I wished I was facing him, but it seemed to be his preferred way to lie there. I almost laughed too.</p><p> </p><p>“Nothin’ from sailing?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>…knife scars on my palm from fighting Israel Hand, and another on the outside of my upper left arm. Inner thigh from a sharp shell as I fell hiking out of the sea after bringing the <em>Hispaniola </em>around the island... a bullet graze on my right ear when the man with his hand on my bare hip had called for me to be shot.</p><p> </p><p>A plethora of others, from the <em>Storm Witch</em>, the <em>Lord Basil, </em>and the <em>Carolina</em>; kitchen scars and little burns, and a very faint scar on my cheek from one winter, when I had sled into the side of a barn as a child.</p><p> </p><p>“Nothing of note,” perhaps my tone gave it away.</p><p> </p><p>“Not a question for in here then…”</p><p> </p><p>“What about you? What’s your worst?”</p><p> </p><p>“I’d think this,” he nudged the back of my legs with what remained of his left thigh, and it startled me—not because I was afraid of it, but because he had always seemed to want to avoid letting me touch it.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Other</em> than that,”</p><p> </p><p>“No, no, because you’ll want a story, and then you’ll be givin’ me those big sad eyes and wanting a <em>second</em> story,”</p><p> </p><p>“So? No reason you can’t keep telling me stories,”</p><p> </p><p>“Because some night I’d run out of ‘em, and then where will I be? Old hopper with a handful of tricks I’ve already showed you.”</p><p> </p><p>“You would start making up stories then,”</p><p> </p><p>“True, darlin’, true,”</p><p> </p><p>“We’re getting close to Bristol.”</p><p> </p><p>“I know?”</p><p> </p><p>“Have a list ready for Scott.” <em>And please don’t leave me</em>. “He’ll be doing supply orders while Anderson and I meet our merchant contacts.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll need someone to write that list down,”</p><p> </p><p>“Scott can do it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Fine.”</p><p> </p><p>“He’s good at what he does,”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re awful green at this,” his arm was snug around me but I wriggled loose enough to turn and face him,</p><p> </p><p>“Maybe,” I leaned up on my elbows, looked down at him. “But it’s <em>my</em> ship.”</p><p> </p><p>“Only for as long as you can keep it,” he didn’t notice that my heart froze at his words; he was too busy playing with a tassel on the edge of my quilt. My grandmother would drop me to hell herself if she knew about the stains he had left on one of her quilts. At least it was only the one, and only on the underside of it.</p><p> </p><p>“What do you mean only—“</p><p> </p><p>“People talk, you know.”</p><p> </p><p>“Silver if—“ I pressed my hands to his chest, meaning to push him out of bed, unsure how we ended up in a position that placed him between me and my escape route, <em>knife, knife, where’s my knife—</em></p><p>
  
</p><p>“I don’t <em>trust</em> Scott. He doesn’t know if he wants to fuck you or fuck you over, and I’m not <em>keen</em> on him doing either,”</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll talk to him again,” I rolled over instead; those little flares of <em>jealousy </em>in him hadn’t been violent or dangerous—yet. So far they had only ever encouraged—well, rather pleasant outcomes. And I was too relieved that he wasn’t, at least not this moment, talking about taking the ship himself.</p><p> </p><p>“Let me say something to him, darlin’, let him know his place.”</p><p> </p><p>“I know you’ve made yourself at home at my desk, but you are the <em>cook</em>. Not an officer, and it isn’t <em>your </em>place.”</p><p> </p><p>“Either way. None of your pure hearts here would dare tell him off,”</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t like him because the two of you are so <em>similar</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“Think I didn’t notice that? You have no sense of judgment—he would push you overboard if left alone on deck with you.”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s not true, we—we have more history than anyone else on this ship.” <em>Silver, would you still push me overboard? </em></p><p> </p><p>“More history than what’s between us?”</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Us.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>“Well—it’s….<em> different</em>.” I settled on the word, because there weren’t words. Silver wasn’t my history, he wasn’t my future, he was a ghost, my girlhood fantasies made flesh—if I had eyes for older partners, if I trusted Scott’s rougher demeanor more than Anderson’s easy companionship then Silver was the reason why. I wasn’t <em>stupid</em>, or in denial, I—</p><p> </p><p><em>……Us.</em> How much gold would it take for him to give me that little shove over the rail? At what point did treasure outweigh whatever it was he was playing at in here? <em>How much was I worth to him, in pounds, dollars, reales?</em></p><p> </p><p>“Different than us. Good to know,” he was <em>scheming</em>. I knew him well enough to know that thoughtful voice wasn’t because he was truly glad to hear that I had no—<em>feelings</em> for Scott, no desire for him—and if I did, it was for Silver’s sake.</p><p> </p><p>“Stop it,” I yawned.</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>We’ll be upon Bristol soon and you’ll be gone again, so please for the love of God and Neptune just hold me tight for these last days.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>Bristol cannot come soon enough because I have to get as many miles between us as possible, before you decide you want my ship more than you want my body.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>“Nothing.”</p><p> </p><p>“Cabin girl?”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Captain</em>,”</p><p> </p><p>“Always working; ‘s just a name for you... Fine, you’re a captain, but there’s not many cabin girls out there in the wide world, and you were one of them,”</p><p> </p><p>“I liked you better when were you a silent ghost.” Sweet words and shallow statements, he would form them all with a soft voice and a tired, half-enchanted smile and outwardly I fell for it all. Yet, inside, I kept reminding myself that this—all of this, everything for him was still some game.</p><p> </p><p>“Something’s amiss with you,”</p><p> </p><p>“If you’re going to make a run for it, I suggest waiting until we’re away from England. Our travels might take us east, or at least into the Mediterranean. Less of a chance of getting caught, and the climate’s better there if you get down on your luck.”</p><p> </p><p>“What are you gettin’ at?”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re going to leave. I never had any—illusions about you.” What an absolute <em>joke</em>. Never had any illusions about Silver? <em>God!</em> My whole existence sometimes felt as if it was built around the false personality he wore for all of two months those years ago.</p><p> </p><p>“Jim, not that I <em>don’t</em> think you’re a clever girl, but—that’s bloody stupid. Like <em>hell</em> am I about the run off on my contract and your sweet little schooner for a moldy jail cell and a rope. I don’t mind having earned your favor. Though, if your quartermaster manages to replace you, I’d rather earn his favor somewhere other than in here.”</p><p> </p><p>I supposed that was a joke. Knowing what I knew then about Captain Flint, it wasn’t very funny at all.</p><p> </p><p>“I doubt Scott would want to. And I doubt he would ever try to take my—“ or at least I <em>did</em> doubt, but if anyone knew betrayal and mutiny, it was Silver. “<em>Schooner</em>? The <em>Polaris</em> is a finer vessel than that!”</p><p> </p><p>“Jim, Jim, luv, <em>darling</em>, she’s a hundred men short of a third rate. She suits you, but she’s <em>little</em>.” If Silver wasn’t so <em>bloody </em>easy to get along with, if we didn’t fit so well then this wouldn’t be so <em>hard</em>. And it would have given some relief my anxiety over his claims about Scott if Silver wasn’t <em>always right</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Earn my favor, he said…good defense. It sounded plausible, here he had work, shelter, money, a few shore leaves a year, and a foolish woman who would stand at his defense if ever captured. Not to mention, he had a stupid woman all to himself. If I had come to the thought on my own, I might believe it, but for the fact that it was out of his mouth, I dismissed it as nonsense.</p><p> </p><p>“Where did you learn the numbers for ships of the line?”</p><p> </p><p>“Sailing, same as everything I know,”</p><p> </p><p>“Were you ever in the navy, Silver?”</p><p> </p><p>A terrifying, mercurial shift turned his face from familiar to cruel, even as the tone in his off-topic reply did not:</p><p> </p><p>“You’ll see, a few more years under your captain’s hat and you’ll know enough to fill the libraries you used to talk about wanting. You’ll learn more than you could in a book out on the sea, under stars.”</p><p>He was silent then, for too long.</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t chase the pastor’s son with a rock.”</p><p> </p><p>“What are you—“</p><p> </p><p>“It was a brick.”</p><p> </p><p>That awful lightning flash of anger left his face like it had never been there, and instead he started laughing, quiet but fully, until he was over me again, leaving kisses that left me cold down my sternum, abs, to lower again. His mouth on me again, tongue setting to its task without formalities or permission (as if I would tell him no?) and my hands slipped into hair that needed washed, my mind slipped into a dream of a bath.</p><p> </p><p>A <em>castle</em>, it was silly. Even if we were able to take all the gold and only split it two ways, it wouldn’t have been enough to live off of after a castle…But a country estate, some quiet corner of England where no one would bother us, and in this dream I am a young bride and I am untying his braids in the bath and my friend is gentle, gentle…</p><p> </p><p>“You crying, girl? Thought you liked this?”</p><p> </p><p>How was I supposed to tell him I shed tears for the man who died before we even reached that cursed island? That I was trying to reconcile my best friend with the murderer? <em>That I was going to miss him so much it felt like he was already gone</em>?</p><p> </p><p>“It’s nothing.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s stabbing my ego, whatever it is.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s nothing <em>you</em> did,” technically, a damned lie, “I don’t want to stay long in Bristol, that’s all. I don’t like the town.”</p><p> </p><p>“That makes two of us.” He paused, rest his head on my belly, “What’s got you in such knots over that place?”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s nothing.” I went back to toying with his hair again before I even noticed what I was doing.</p><p> </p><p>“Someone threaten you, luv?” he pushed himself out from under my legs before settling back at his spot.</p><p> </p><p>“You could say that,” I shouldn’t have said it.</p><p> </p><p>“Give me a name.”</p><p> </p><p>“Silver, I deal with insubordination my own way and I will not—“</p><p> </p><p>“Why not? You’ve got me, and I know to keep a crew in line—if someone’s a-givin’ you trouble…”</p><p> </p><p>“I will not react kindly to insubordination from you either. I <em>told</em> you.”</p><p> </p><p>For some reason, he found this funny, and deserving of another kiss. Silver rest most of his weight on me, and I suppose if I truly loathed the idea of a kiss then, I could have shoved him off of me, but it felt like a trap.</p><p> </p><p>It still felt like a trap when his hand on my neck tilted my jaw just enough to slide his tongue past my lips. An awful, nasty trick that made me shudder and had me holding him down, my legs around his hips, and I could tell myself that the rocking of the ship encouraged me to move against him but it would be a lie. I reached down between us, and (in a bold move for me) I found him and rubbed at him until he started to get stiff again. <em>I could have shoved him off of me</em>…</p><p> </p><p>And so I did…and promptly climbed onto him.</p><p> </p><p>The rough northern waters helped in this position.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>A short time later, I was still catching my breath, and he had barely just <em>finished</em>, when he asked, quite breathless himself:</p><p> </p><p>“What’s waiting for you in Bristol?”</p><p> </p><p>“Reality.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>@Silver and Captain Jim, here's a challenge for you two idiots: have one (1) meaningful conversation that doesn't start or end in her bunk.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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